Invited Reviewer Resources

The Royal College of Surgeons of England’s (RCS) Invited Review Mechanism (IRM) helps healthcare organisations by providing an external expert opinion on a range of patient safety and service delivery issues.

The invited review team maintains a panel of over 150 clinical and lay reviewers who assist us with this work. We will also work with new reviewers, particularly when undertaking reviews involving highly sub-specialised areas of clinical practice.

Reviewer resources 

The following materials are available to all review panel members:

• core video resources: a set of short instructive videos covering many aspects of the IRM process and your role as part of this.
• essential IRM documentation: including our review handbook, descriptions of the roles of the reviewers and example review materials.

If you have kindly agreed to assist us with an invited review visit and you have not participated in a review before we ask you to familiarise yourself with these materials.

Reviewers who have worked with us more regularly may also find it helpful to refer to some of these resources in the run-up to a new review visit to refresh themselves.

Reviewer update days

To keep in contact with our panel of reviewers, the invited review team hold annual Reviewer Update Days, usually in September, at the College. We hope that each of our reviewers are able to attend one of these Update Days once every three years. These are interactive events to help reviewers keep in touch with what we have been doing, provide updates on changes to our process, and share learning through discussions of anonymised case scenarios.

Please contact us if you wish to record your interest in attending our next reviewer update day.

Essential process and standards documentation 

Also provided on these pages are a range of key standards documents published by the College on what it means to be a highly performing surgeon or surgical service.

There are also links to other relevant guidance documents published by other professional bodies such as the General Medical Council (GMC).