NHS England
APLAN

Project overview

Based on previous work done with Health Education England, Illuminaries were recommended to develop a solution to replace the existing Dental Trainee peer review process, which was no longer fit for purpose. Students were writing up cases, with no particular structure and submitting via Dropbox. These cases were then manually sent for review to other students and supervisors for review.

Our solution

APLAN is a computer based application designed to facilitate Anonymous Peer Assessment and support Peer Review. It can be modified for use within any specialty that would benefit from the Peer Assessment of learners work and evaluation of assessor skills and knowledge.

"Students" are anonymized by APLAN, they can upload a Case Study or any other piece of written work, supported by images such as radiographs or photographs.

These case study's are distributed to assessors, these are fellow students and educational supervisors. Using a feedback template the case studies are scored and with written feedback.

APLAN will then rank all students based on the scores and will distribute results to Program Support, these results can be sent back to the students for reflection or moderated during a peer review day where APLAN will allow for an overall score to be awarded.

APLAN will allow students an opportunity to evaluate the feedback they have received again anonymously. The evaluation is a mixture of a simple "Likert" scoring template with room for written comments.

The system automatically highlights cases using a "traffic light" system and can highlight reviews with scores which are potentially outliers. Educational supervisors scores compared to averages are stored longitudinally in order to monitor long terms performance.

APLAN has been run across 10 different regions within the UK and Northern Ireland.