Five age bands: under 16, 16 to 25, 26 to 45, 46 to 60, Over 60. The original FPM logbook uses banded age rather than exact age because the competency assessment is interested in age cohorts, not individual patient ages. You need to demonstrate that your case mix includes older patients with comorbidities, not just the 32-year-old with post-surgical neuropathic pain who is straightforward to manage.
This is the v1.0 of the pain logbook, the one that went live on 30 October 2011 before the updates in v1.2. The core clinical structure is identical — the field set and dropdown options were designed from the start to mirror the FPM official logbook exactly, so that the CSV export workflow could function without column remapping.
The Consultation Type Data That Most Trainees Ignore
The Consultation field — Domiciliary, In Patient, Out Patient Clinic Dr Only, Out Patient Clinic MDT, Telephone, E-mail, Intervention, Other — is the one that tells the assessor how your practice is distributed across different care settings.
An MDT clinic consultation and a solo outpatient clinic consultation are fundamentally different clinical activities. In the MDT setting you are working with physiotherapy, psychology, and potentially occupational therapy — the management plan comes out of a consensus process rather than a single clinician decision. In the solo clinic, you own the entire consultation, the differential, and the management decision. Both count toward your portfolio, but they count differently, and the FPM assessor needs to see evidence of both.
Telephone and E-mail consultation types are included because they represent a real component of chronic pain practice — following up post-procedure patients, adjusting medication doses between visits, managing opioid prescribing between scheduled reviews. That activity used to go undocumented because it did not fit the standard clinic entry format. It goes in the logbook now.
The Procedure Field and What Is Not in It
The Management(procedure) dropdown contains the procedural spectrum from Caudal Epidural through Spinal Cord Stimulator implant. What is notable is what requires an active decision to log versus what happens by default.
A trainee who logs only the procedures they did as primary operator is building an incomplete portfolio. The Contact Type field — Follow Up, New, Repeat Procedure, Observing — tells the assessor the nature of your involvement. An Observing entry still counts as exposure to a procedure you may not yet have the case numbers to perform independently. A Repeat Procedure entry shows you are managing long-term procedural patients, not just doing first-time interventions.
The gap between what the trainee did and what they logged is where fellowship portfolio problems originate. A Coeliac Plexus Block performed under Immediate supervision in a cancer pain patient is a significant case. If it goes in the logbook as an Intervention consultation with Management(procedure) = N/A because the trainee was not the primary operator, the case disappears from the competency record entirely. The correct entry: Consultation = Intervention, Supervision = Immediate, Procedure = Coeliac Plexus Block, Contact Type = New.
The CRPS Case That Takes 20 Minutes to Log Correctly
A 58-year-old woman. CRPS type 1 following right wrist fracture, 18 months duration. Pain site: Upper Limb/Shoulder. Pain type: CRPS. Pain source: Post Surgical/Trauma (the original fracture) plus Neurological (the autonomic component). Management today: Stellate Ganglion block under Distant supervision. Second management field: Physiotherapy referral maintained.
Age band: 46 to 60. Consultation: Intervention. Contact Type: Repeat Procedure — she had a previous Stellate Ganglion three months ago. Pain duration: 1 to 5 Years.
That entry takes three minutes to complete. It will be referenced by an FPM assessor in 18 months who is counting your Stellate Ganglion cases and checking whether you have CRPS cases with complex multimodal management documented in your logbook.
The Comments free-text field gets: "Right CRPS type 1, autonomic predominant. Third Stellate Ganglion in series. Incomplete response to previous two — reassessed for SCS referral. Physiotherapy programme ongoing." That is the clinical narrative that the dropdown fields cannot carry.