Professional record and reflections

Your Professional record is a dated, located list of every organisation you have worked in during your regulator's window. It takes the roles and hours from your logged sessions and flags gaps that your regulator may ask you to explain.

A reflection records what you learned, in your own words. You can attach it to a logged session or keep it free-standing when it came from learning elsewhere.

A progress meter appears only where the regulator publishes a number. GPhC, GDC and GOC set numeric requirements, so their meters show your saved records against them. Nurses and midwives see their targets on the NMC revalidation page instead.

Once your cycle has an end date and that date is inside 180 days, Sessional emails you while you are still below one of your regulator's numbers. It says what you have recorded against each of them, how many days are left, and up to three recent sessions worth writing up, named by organisation and date. It is written from your own record, with no model involved.

At most one arrives every 28 days, so a cycle that ends in six months brings six of them at the very most, and none once you are at every target. It stops as soon as you are.

Turn it off under Notification preferences, where it is listed as CPD and revalidation cycle reminders. Nothing else changes if you do: the meters and the record stay exactly as they are.

If nothing has arrived and your regulator does publish a number, the usual reason is that your cycle has no end date yet. Set it in the date field near the top of the Professional record page. The GOC cycle is fixed at 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2027 and needs nothing from you.

Use the three questions to keep the entry specific:

1. What happened?
2. What did you learn?
3. What will you change?

Type it yourself, or write it with Sandy. Sandy is the Sessional assistant, and there are two ways in. Jot rough notes in one box and press Make it a reflection. Or press Talk it through and answer up to eight questions, one at a time, in your own words. If you are not sure what to write about, the Reflections page offers Start from a session cards built from your own session log.

Those cards are the one part of the page that sends something before you have written anything. What goes is the same handful of facts the learning needs use, and only those: the organisations you worked at, the type of setting each one is, the dates and start times of those sessions, the gaps between them, and how many you worked at one organisation. No reflection text goes with them. The same EU provider turns each fact into one question, the questions come back to your screen, and the set is kept on your profile and reused for a day so the page does not ask again every time you open it. Picking a card puts its question in the notes box for you to answer, and nothing is saved until you save it.

The draft fills the three fields under a banner saying when it was composed. Open Compare with your notes to see which parts of the draft do not reuse your own wording. It is a word-matching aid and nothing more: it looks for runs of four words and understands neither text, so it cannot tell you whether a sentence is true to what you meant. Read the whole draft. If you would rather keep your own sentences, choose Arrange only: Sandy orders them under the three headings and fixes the grammar, and writes nothing new. Every field stays editable either way.

Nothing saves until you tick I have read this and it is my own account. The record keeps the notes or answers you gave, the mode you chose and the model that composed it, and the export prints one line saying the record was written with the assistant from your own notes and answers. Declaring the assistance is the point: hiding it is what a regulator objects to.

Before anything is saved, the identifier check blocks NHS numbers, dates of birth and named people. It asks you to confirm any other detail that might identify someone, and it runs on a transcribed voice note exactly as it runs on typed text. The check buttons still only read your reflection: they look for identifiers, suggest which standard or domain applies, and list what the record type still needs.

Sandy will not answer a clinical question. Ask what dose you should have given and it will point you at the BNF, NICE or a senior colleague and return to the reflection. It never fills in your hours, points or minutes: every number your regulator counts is one you type.

The rough-notes box and each of Sandy's answer boxes has a recorder. Watch the timer, stop when you are done, and nothing leaves the device until you press Transcribe. The recording then goes to OVHcloud AI Endpoints in the EU, comes back as text, and is not stored by Sessional or used to train any model. The transcript lands in the box for you to check first, because a transcript can mis-hear a name or a drug name.

If your browser has no recorder, or you would rather not use one, the microphone on your phone keyboard still dictates straight into the box on the device, as it always has.

The GDC, GOC and HCPC all ask you to plan your development as well as record it, and the hardest part of a plan is the first line. Press Suggest learning needs on the Reflections page and Sandy offers up to five, each a single sentence, with a second sentence naming what in your own record it came from.

The material is yours and only yours: the organisations, settings and patterns in your logged sessions, and the titles and "what changes" lines of your last ten saved reflections. Nothing else is sent, and the suggestions are not clinical advice.

Nurses and midwives get the same panel on the NMC Revalidation page, drawn from their reflective accounts.

Two things will stop it. With no worked sessions and no saved reflections there is nothing to draw on, and it says so rather than inventing a list. And if the assistant is unavailable it says that too, rather than falling back to something generic: a list of learning needs that came from nobody's record would be worse than no list.

Course certificates go in the CPD evidence store, which is free for your first 50 files and separate from your document store. Sessional reads the provider, title, date and hours off the certificate for you to confirm, and you can attach it to any record. A certificate forwarded to your receipts address lands there too. CPD evidence and certificates→ covers the whole flow.

Reflective accounts, CPD hours, feedback and confirmation stay on the NMC Revalidation page→. The Professional record gives you the NMC practice hours log from the same shifts, so the figures stay consistent.

Sandy, voice notes and the certificate store are on that page too: a reflective account can be written from rough notes or a conversation in the same way, and a CPD entry can carry the certificate behind it. Nothing about NMC evidence has moved.

PDF and text exports are free on every plan, permanently, and were on Plus until 8 September 2026. The PDF is a dated document to keep with your evidence. The text export follows the same headings and is ready to copy into the portal or portfolio you already use.

• GMC: a scope-of-work statement for FourteenFish or Clarity.
• HCPC: a dated practice list for the HCPC profile template.
• NMC: a practice hours log for the NMC log template.
• GPhC: records shaped for myGPhC.
• GDC: records shaped for eGDC.
• GOC: records shaped for MyCPD.

GPs, hospital doctors, psychiatrists and physician associates get one more export, free on every plan: Export appraisal pack, a single PDF built for the conversation rather than for a portal. It runs from your last appraisal date, or from a date you choose, and it holds:

• Your scope-of-work statement: every organisation, setting and role in the period.
• Your reflections grouped by Good Medical Practice domain, GMP1 to GMP4, each with its date, title, the three fields and any certificate behind it. Reflections you did not assign a domain sit under "No domain chosen" rather than being guessed into one.
• Your CPD activities in their own table, with the minutes you declared and the evidence attached.
• Any gaps in the period, with the explanations you wrote against them.
• A coverage index: records per domain, hours of CPD, evidence count, and "no entry" where a domain has none. It is arithmetic on what you saved, not a score and not a judgement.

Each assisted record carries the same one-line marker the other exports print, so the pack says what was written with the assistant and what was not.