The training portfolio is due at the end of the term. The assessor wants a breakdown of your case mix: how many ASA III-IV patients, how many paediatric cases, which procedures you performed as primary operator versus supervised, and whether you've hit the threshold for neuraxial blocks. You have paper logs from the last eight weeks and a recollection of the cases before that.
Reconstructing a compliant logbook from memory and scattered notes is a recognized rite of passage in anaesthesia training. It should not be.
The Case Record From First Breath to Last
Date, Start, and End document the temporal envelope of each anaesthetic. Combined, they give you the case duration — a data point that matters for JCCA category analysis and for understanding your own distribution between short procedures and prolonged cases.
Sex, Age, and ASA are the patient profile fields. ASA status (I through V, with the E modifier for emergency) is the fundamental risk stratification that every supervising specialist uses to assess a trainee's case complexity exposure. A logbook with 200 cases, all ASA I-II elective, demonstrates volume without demonstrating competency in higher-acuity anaesthetic management. The Priority field — elective, urgent, emergent — adds the scheduling context that makes ASA status fully interpretable.
Speciality and Operation together define the procedure context: Colorectal, Orthopaedic (Hip Arthroplasty), Neurosurgery (VP Shunt), ENT (Parotidectomy). These two fields are what training program assessors use to evaluate case breadth. A trainee who has 40 hip and knee cases and nothing else hasn't been exposed to the case variety that anaesthetic fellowship requires.
The Technique Documentation
Anaesthetic 1 and Anaesthetic 2 with Anesthetic 2: Operator Status and Anesthetic 2: Technique capture the primary and secondary anaesthetic approach with the critical distinction of who did what. Operator Status — Supervised, Unsupervised, Performed, Assisted — is not a formality. It's the competency claim.
An airway assessment where you intubated with the consultant watching is not the same competency evidence as one where you managed the airway independently on a Grade III laryngoscopy view with the consultant scrubbing. Both entries look identical in a plain text note. In the logbook, the Operator Status field makes the distinction explicit and queryable.
The triple procedure tracking — Procedure 1, 2, 3 each with their own Operator Status and Technique — handles the reality that many anaesthetic episodes involve multiple interventions: induction plus arterial line plus epidural placement, or RSI plus awake fibreoptic intubation attempt plus LMA rescue. Each procedure gets its own status record.
Supervision and the Competency Narrative
Supervision and Supervisor document the oversight structure. Most training programs require a minimum proportion of cases under various supervision categories to demonstrate progressive autonomy. Supervision is the category (Direct, Indirect, Supervisor Available, Unsupervised); Supervisor is the named consultant, which matters when your portfolio is audited and the assessor asks the supervisor to confirm their recollection.
Incidents and Incident Details close the case record with the clinical safety data that separates a reflective practitioner's logbook from a purely administrative count. A laryngospasm on emergence, a failed spinal requiring conversion to GA, a suspected anaphylaxis — these are events that generate critical incident reports in hospital quality systems. They also represent the highest-density learning opportunities in anaesthetic training. The incident fields capture them at the moment they're freshest.