The GP ePortfolio Explained: A Beginner’s Guide for New GP Trainees
If you are about to start GP training, or you are a few weeks into ST1, there is a good chance someone has already mentioned “the ePortfolio” to you in a tone that suggested you should understand what it is. Most new trainees do not, and there is no reason you should. Nobody hands you a manual on day one, and the platform itself, FourteenFish, is not something most doctors have used before starting GP training.
It helps to start with what the ePortfolio actually is, rather than what it feels like from the outside. It is the system that holds your entire training record together. Your curriculum, your workplace based assessments, your reflections and your annual review all sit inside it, and by the time you reach your Certificate of Completion of Training, it is effectively the evidence base your whole training has been built on. Seen that way, it stops being an administrative chore and becomes something closer to a working record of how you are developing as a doctor.
This guide covers what you need to know in your first few weeks: how to get access, what makes a log entry genuinely useful rather than just present, how often to write, the mistakes that catch out most new trainees, and how all of this eventually feeds into your Educational Supervisor Review and ARCP. The aim is that you finish reading this feeling less like the ePortfolio is a mystery, and more like you have a workable routine for using it well.
– For GP trainee update and teaching emails click here
– Join National AKT WhatsApp teaching group here
– Join National SCA WhatsApp teaching group here
What the GP ePortfolio actually is
The GP ePortfolio, officially called the RCGP Trainee Portfolio, is the online system every GP trainee uses to record learning, log assessments and track progress across all three years of training, in both hospital and primary care posts. It is built on a platform called FourteenFish, which the RCGP partnered with in 2020, replacing the previous ePortfolio system trainees used before then.
Think of it less as a form you fill in and more as a running record of your development. It holds your learning logs, your workplace based assessment results, your Personal Development Plans, your Educational Supervisor Reviews and, ultimately, the evidence your ARCP panel uses to decide whether you are progressing as expected. Nothing about it is designed to catch you out. It exists because GP training does not have a single final exam that proves you are ready for independent practice. Instead, readiness is built up gradually and needs to be demonstrated along the way, and the ePortfolio is where that demonstration lives.
It is worth knowing that the platform itself is well designed. It includes a training map that shows your progress at a glance, progress graphs, automatic tracking of assessment invites, and built in tools that scan your entries for sensitive data, such as anything that could identify a patient, before you save it. None of that removes the work of writing good entries, but it does mean the system is trying to help you rather than simply audit you.
Getting access: registration, FourteenFish and the app
Access to the ePortfolio follows on from registering with the RCGP as a GP specialty trainee, which normally happens once your deanery has confirmed your training place. Registration sets up your FourteenFish account, and you will receive login details by email, so it is worth using the same email address for both your RCGP registration and your FourteenFish login to avoid access issues later. You log in at fourteenfish.com. Deanery staff and panel members use a separate portal called FishBase, which you will not need as a trainee.
There is also a FourteenFish Portfolio app, available for iOS and Android. You can write rough notes on a learning log straight after a clinic, even without an internet connection, and the entry syncs to your account once you are back online. If you find yourself thinking about a case on the drive home, or between patients during a quiet moment, the app is the easiest way to capture that thought before it disappears. Many trainees only discover this months into training, so it is worth setting up in your first week rather than your first ARCP.
One early, practical step to take as soon as you get access is arranging a Placement Planning Meeting with your Clinical Supervisor at the start of each new post, and logging it as a learning log entry. It sounds like a formality, but it sets out your educational objectives for that placement and gives you a natural anchor point to return to later when you are reflecting on what you actually learned. If you are about to start a new rotation, our guide on settling into a new GP training rotation covers this alongside the other things worth sorting out in your first week.
What makes a strong learning log entry
This is the part that matters most, and it is also the part most new trainees get wrong at first, not through lack of effort but because nobody has explained what “good” actually looks like.
The RCGP is explicit about what it wants to see in a learning log entry. Good reflection has depth, meaning you go beyond simply listing what happened and instead explain what it meant. It shows critical thinking, meaning you examine your own decision making rather than just describing the outcome. It shows self awareness, meaning you are honest about what you got right and what you would do differently, including how the situation made you feel. And it shows evidence of learning, meaning you say clearly what you now understand that you did not before, and what you plan to do about it.
One further requirement sits alongside all of this: every entry must be anonymised, with no identifiable details about patients, colleagues or locations, and a professional tone maintained throughout. This is exactly what the ePortfolio’s built in sensitive data scanner, mentioned above, is checking for as you write, so it is worth getting into the habit of anonymising as you go rather than editing it in afterwards.
In practice, this comes down to where you put your effort within the entry. Keep the description of what actually happened brief. Nobody needs a detailed clinical narrative, and the RCGP is clear that the value of an entry lies in your analysis, not your recounting of events. Put the weight of your writing into what you learned and what you would do differently next time. A useful rule of thumb that many trainees find helpful is to check how often you have written “I” in that section. Entries that stay in the passive voice, describing what the patient presented with or what the guideline says, are usually still description. Entries that say “I initially assumed… I later realised… I would now approach this by…” are doing the actual work of reflection. This blog covers reflection in more detail.
It also matters which log type you use. The Clinical Case Review is your main format and should be about a real patient you have personally seen, and this should make up the majority of your entries. But not everything belongs in a CCR. A Quality Improvement Activity needs its own structured log, separate from a general reflection, and a Learning Event Analysis is different again. Our full guide to QIP and QIA requirements in GP training covers exactly what each of these needs and how they differ, which is worth reading before you write your first one.
How often you should be writing
The official requirement is 36 Clinical Case Reviews per training year, which averages out to three a month, pro rata if you are training less than full time. That number matters less as a target to hit and more as a signal about pacing. Three a month is entirely manageable if you write something most weeks. It becomes a real source of stress if you leave it for six weeks and then try to reconstruct three months of clinical experience from memory the night before your Educational Supervisor Review.
Little and often does beat backloading here, and not just because it is less stressful. Entries written close to the event are more detailed, more honest and easier to link convincingly to a specific capability, because you actually remember how the case unfolded and how you felt about it. Entries written weeks later tend to flatten into generic statements, and both your supervisor and, eventually, your ARCP panel can usually tell the difference. Spacing your entries out across each six month review period, rather than clustering them just before a deadline, is also a pattern that assessors notice, and not in a way that works in your favour.
A workable habit is to pick one or two cases a week that challenged you, made you uncertain, or taught you something, and write about them within a day or two while the details are still fresh. That is a far lighter lift than it sounds once it becomes routine, and it tends to sit more comfortably alongside the rest of training life than trying to protect a single long session for portfolio work every few weeks.
Linking your entries to the capabilities framework
Every learning log entry should link to one or more of the RCGP’s professional capabilities, and most entries can also be linked to up to two of the nine clinical experience groups that structure the curriculum. Getting this mapping right is not just an administrative box to tick. It is how your Educational Supervisor and, later, your ARCP panel can see that your evidence covers a broad base of clinical practice rather than repeatedly demonstrating the same one or two strengths.
There should be at least one log entry addressing each capability within every six month review period, which is another reason writing regularly across the whole period works better than concentrating your effort at the end. If you want the full list of the 13 capabilities and the nine clinical experience groups, along with how the required numbers break down across ST1, ST2 and ST3, our detailed guide to Workplace Based Assessment for GP trainees sets all of this out in full, and is worth bookmarking alongside this one.
Common mistakes new trainees make early on
A handful of patterns come up again and again with new trainees, and almost all of them are easy to fix once you know to look out for them.
– Writing entries that describe what happened in detail but say little about what you would do differently
– Leaving entries too vague or generic to link convincingly to a specific capability
– Saving several weeks of entries for one long session before an Educational Supervisor Review
– Forgetting to log Out of Hours and unscheduled care experience, which needs specific documentation
– Treating a Quality Improvement Activity as a spare paragraph inside a general reflection rather than its own structured log
– Not completing a Placement Planning Meeting entry at the start of a new post
None of these reflect badly on your clinical ability. They reflect the fact that reflective portfolio writing is a specific, learnable skill that almost nobody starts GP training already skilled in. The trainees who settle into it quickest tend to be the ones who treat it as a short, regular habit rather than an occasional large task, which is really the theme running through this whole guide.
A note for IMG trainees
If you trained or worked outside the UK before starting GP training here, the style of writing the ePortfolio expects can feel genuinely unfamiliar at first, and that is worth naming rather than glossing over. Many training systems reward confident, complete answers and a formal, third person tone. The UK’s reflective log entry does close to the opposite. It rewards uncertainty stated honestly, first person ownership of your own thinking, and openness about what you got wrong or would change. That is not a clinical knowledge gap, and it says nothing about your ability as a doctor. It is a specific academic writing convention, and like any convention, it improves quickly with feedback and repetition. Reading a few worked examples from the RCGP’s own guidance, and asking your Educational Supervisor directly what a strong entry looks like in practice, tends to close this gap faster than most trainees expect.
How your ePortfolio feeds into your ESR and ARCP
Everything covered so far builds toward two things. Your Educational Supervisor Review happens once a year and is your Educational Supervisor’s structured summary of your progress, drawn directly from the evidence in your ePortfolio. This is why the quality and spread of your entries matters so much. A supervisor cannot write a strong, evidence based review from a portfolio that is thin, backloaded or vague, no matter how good you actually are in clinic.
Your Annual Review of Competence Progression, or ARCP, is the formal panel review that decides whether you progress to the next training year, and it relies almost entirely on what is recorded in your ePortfolio, alongside your completed Educational Supervisor Review. For most trainees, there is no face to face element to this. The panel is working from your portfolio evidence alone, which is precisely why a well maintained ePortfolio, built up steadily across the year, tends to make this a formality rather than something to dread. For the full detail on what each assessment type requires and how ESR and ARCP fit together across all three training years, our WPBA guide linked above walks through the complete picture, and the RCGP’s own Workplace Based Assessment pages are the best place to check anything that has changed since this was written.
Final thoughts
The ePortfolio rewards the same underlying skill throughout training: taking a real clinical situation, thinking honestly about your own reasoning, and being clear about what you would do differently. That is worth knowing early, because it is not a skill that stays confined to FourteenFish. Trainees who build a genuine habit of applied clinical reflection through their learning log often find that the same muscle serves them well later, when the MRCGP AKT asks you to apply knowledge to a scenario rather than simply recall it, and when the SCA asks you to reason through a consultation in real time rather than recite a checklist. None of that means you need to prepare for exams from day one of ST1. It simply means the habit you are building now is not wasted effort once exam season arrives.
How Arora Medical Education Can Help
Arora Medical Education was founded by Dr Aman Arora, a GP with over 15 years of experience supporting GP trainees through every stage of training, from the first weeks of ST1 through to the MRCGP AKT and SCA. If you are also preparing for the AKT or SCA, our AKT resources and SCA resources are built around how GP trainees actually learn and are assessed, with a strong focus on applied clinical reasoning rather than rote memorisation. You can also join the free national AKT and SCA WhatsApp teaching groups for daily teaching from Dr Arora, at no cost.
– For GP trainee update and teaching emails click here
– Join National AKT WhatsApp teaching group here
– Join National SCA WhatsApp teaching group here
Other Blogs That May Help
– Workplace Based Assessment (WPBA) For GP Trainees – What You Need To Know
– QIP and QIA in GP Training: Everything You Need to Know (With Ideas That Actually Work)
– Suggested PDPs for GP Training Rotations – GP Trainees
– How to use Reflection in your Portfolio Entries
– New GP Trainee Rotation: 5 things you must consider
– How Mindset can Influence your Clinic in GP Training
Author Bio — Dr Aman Arora
Hi! I’m Dr. Aman Arora, a Portfolio GP with over a decade of clinical and teaching experience, dedicated to helping doctors achieve their goals with confidence. Having had the privilege of supporting more than 50,000 doctors worldwide across exams such as MRCGP AKT, SCA, MSRA, PLAB 2 and PLAB 1, I understand the challenges you face and the strategies needed to overcome them. Through personalised face-to-face sessions, engaging online courses, mocks, audio and a vibrant social media community, we’re here to guide you every step of the way.
Whether you’re looking to pass crucial exams or take the next big step in your medical career, we’re here to help you succeed. Feel free to get in touch with any thoughts, questions, or ideas — I look forward to working with you and being part of your journey.
Author Bio — Dr Pooja Arora
Dr Pooja Arora is a GP with a background in Medical Politics, where she passionately focuses on improving the opportunities and working conditions for junior doctors. She is proud to hold FRCGP (Fellow of Royal College of General Practitioners).
You can find out more about Pooja’s previous roles and qualifications here.
