Can I have a copy of the answer guide?

This has been considered and decided. The UKONS SACT Passport Steering Group has discussed requests for a separate answer guide in detail on several occasions, and unanimously decided not to produce one. The content of the passport belongs to UKONS, so it isn't Compassly's to reproduce or distribute in any other form.

Where the answer guide is now

When the passport moved from paper to Compassly in 2023, the answer guide moved with it. It now sits inside each competency, so it is always the current version and always next to the answer it relates to.

As a Supervisor, when you review a learner's written answers you see the answer guide beside them, and for multiple choice questions the right and wrong answers are shown clearly. You can give feedback in Compassly or talk it through with the learner in person, and AI can help by drafting suggested feedback to the learner for you to review.

Compassly works on phones and tablets as well as in any browser, so the simplest way to have the full answer guide with you is to have Compassly with you. Open the learner's competency on your device during the session and the guide is there, up to date, next to their answers.

If you want to support a learner before they finish, encourage them to submit early. There is no limit on how many times answers can be submitted, marked and improved, so you can see their thinking, give feedback and let them build their answer up over several attempts. Every submission and comment is kept in their record.

Getting the digital passport

If you don't yet have access to the UKONS SACT Competency Passport on Compassly:

• The vast majority of organisations already use Compassly for the passport, so start by asking colleagues whether they use it and can help you get set up. Each organisation is set up once, so in a multi-site organisation, colleagues at another site may already have done this for you.
• If you believe your organisation has never been set up, follow the guidance on registering your organisation for the digital passport.

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Why there is no PDF or printed copy

The passport is updated directly in Compassly. UKONS keeps the questions and answer guides current, and changes reach every organisation straight away. These updates happen several times a year, so a printed or PDF copy would start going out of date as soon as it was made, and assessors working from different copies would be marking to different standards.

The structure is richer than the paper version. The paper passport was a single 80-page PDF, and the answer guide could follow it page by page. The digital passport has selectable modules for each route of administration, plus new content written every year for renewal assessments, which doesn't lend itself to a single answer document.

It protects the integrity of the passport. A document of answers is easy to forward, and once it circulates it can reach learners before they write their own answers. With the paper passport, some learners' answers were clearly copied from the answer guide; nurses bypassing learning and understanding the content this way put patient safety and the wider integrity of the passport at risk. The value of the passport rests on each nurse showing their own knowledge, so the answer guide must stay only with the people marking.

Maintaining a separate copy would take a great deal of time and effort. UKONS is a charity, largely run by volunteers. Spending those scarce resources on a separate answer guide isn't a good use of their time when the vast majority of members don't need one.

It is a marking aid, not a model answer. The answer guide sets out the national standard a Supervisor looks for. A good answer also reflects local policy and practice, which only you and your organisation can judge, so the guide works best read alongside the learner's own words and the supervisor's experience.

Services still using the paper passport

The paper answer guide (last issued as the 2018 edition) has been withdrawn by UKONS and is no longer considered clinically current. It isn't distributed by UKONS or by Compassly, and we'd advise against using any copy you come across.

If you have staff ready to start, the way forward is the digital passport.

If you have staff part way through the paper passport, we recommend they move to the digital passport. This may mean repeating some work, but the paper content is now many years out of date, so anyone who hasn't already completed and maintained the passport in full should be working through the current digital content.

Staff who fully completed the paper passport in the past can have it recorded in Compassly using retrospective competencies, so their achievement is kept with the rest of their record.

Questions we're often asked

Still have questions?

We'd recommend that UKONS Members get in touch through the UKONS SACT Members Interest Group:

https://ukons.org/members-interest-groups/systemic-anticancer-therapy-mig

This is not an area that the Compassly team can provide further support on, as the content and decisions belong to UKONS.