The questions worth answering, in the order you will need them — from putting Clerked on your phone to moving your logbook onto a new one. Tap one to open it.
Never put patient identifiable details into Clerked.
No names, initials, hospital or NHS numbers, dates of birth or admission dates. There is no box for any of them, and age is stored as a number and a unit, so a case reads 70 years and never a birthday.
The free-text boxes are the exception, because you type into them. A 70-year-old for an emergency laparotomy is enough for any panel, and enough for you to remember the case.
Pre-op clinic and intensive care have their own places. Acute pain does not yet.
Every case starts with three buttons — Operation, Pre-op and ICM — and each changes what the form asks and where the case is counted, so clinic and unit work no longer sits inside the count of anaesthetics you gave. Acute pain has no heading of its own yet, so logging it as an ordinary case still counts it as an anaesthetic.
Cases you logged before this are unchanged, and nothing was reclassified behind your back, until you open one and switch it over.
Clerked is a website that installs like an app. There is no App Store download and no signing up.
Afterwards it is an icon on your home screen, full screen, with no browser bars — and it works with no signal at all. That is the point: an anaesthetic room in a basement is exactly where you need to log a case and exactly where your phone has no reception.
Clerked runs in any modern browser, so a ward or office computer works — and it is often the better place to catch up on a week of typing, or to print your summary on a real screen.
But a normal browser window remembers. Your logbook would stay on that computer after you close it, and the next person to sit down at that profile could open Clerked and read it. On a shared or NHS machine, use a private window instead.
A private window keeps everything in memory and destroys it when you close it. Nothing is written to that computer's disk, and nothing appears in its history. The trade is that it starts empty every time, so the sequence is:
Two more things worth knowing. A backup you save on a hospital computer lands in its Downloads folder, and that is a trace — put it straight onto your own storage and delete it from Downloads. And that file holds your notes and reflections in full, so treat it as you would anything else of yours: your own drive or your own email, not the shared one.
Some managed NHS desktops block installing web apps or run browsers too old for this. Clerked will still open and work in the window; it simply will not install to the desktop or work offline there. Your phone remains the reliable copy.
Most days start with a list. On the home screen tap New session and fill in the date, the hospital, the theatre, and what you expect most of the day to be — speciality, your role, your supervision.
Then tap Add case for each patient. Every case arrives already filled in from the session, so a full list is mostly the operation and whatever differs. Prefilled values show greyed and italic until you touch them, so a guess never looks like something you checked.
On the case itself, Who asks who you were with. Initials are enough — it is a colleague's name sitting in your records and travelling into your backups, and initials identify them to you just as well.
Pre-op. The form stops asking about technique and destination. Start a list at a pre-op clinic and every case on it begins as an assessment already.
ICM. Choose a ward round or patient care. A ward round asks only what you contributed — whether you took part or led it, and how closely you were supervised — because a round is a room full of patients, not one. Patient care asks for the patient, why they are on the unit, and above all what you did for them: procedures and regional blocks both, because a fascia iliaca on the unit is the same block as one in theatre. Start a list on ICU and every case on it begins as an ICM entry.
The procedure list covers the work FICM asks trainees to evidence: airway and access, bronchoscopy, filtration, proning, drains and taps, admissions and transfers, resuscitation and trauma calls, and the end-of-life activities — treatment limitation decisions, discussions with families, organ donation conversations and brain-stem death testing. Procedures are counted wherever you did them, so a tracheostomy on the unit sits in the same total as one in theatre. Arterial and central lines also ask where they went and which side, so your logbook shows femoral access rather than only a count of lines.
Open Settings → Bring in another logbook and choose the file you exported from the RCoA Lifelong Learning platform or from AnaestheticsApp. A plain CSV works too.
You get a preview before anything is written: how many cases, over what dates, which look like duplicates, and anything the file used that Clerked did not recognise. Where a word could not be matched you are asked rather than guessed at, and your answer is remembered for next time.
Anything genuinely unreadable is left blank and flagged, never invented — and a whole import can be undone in one tap afterwards.
Tap any case — from the calendar, from its session, or from the case list where you can filter by date, speciality, supervision or status and search by operation. Change whatever you like: every keystroke saves as you type. There is no save button anywhere in Clerked.
At the bottom of every case is Write-up, with three things you can add. Nothing appears until you ask for it, so a case you just want counted stays short.
Reflections stay out of the RCoA summary entirely — that goes to a panel, and a reflection is yours to share or not. Each one has a box to tick confirming you have read it back and there is nothing in it that identifies the patient or a colleague, and only ticked entries go into the reflections file you can export.
One thing worth knowing before you write your first: reflective notes are not legally privileged in the UK. Write them as you would be content for them to be read.
The mortarboard icon at the top of the home screen. Tap Log an activity for a course, a conference, departmental teaching, a journal club, simulation or an exam — with the credits as the certificate states them, and a photo of the certificate if you have one.
The chart icon at the top of the home screen. Choose your dates — a training year, a placement, or since you last met your supervisor — and every count is worked out from confirmed cases only.
Settings → Backups and exports. You can take everything out at any time, without an account and without asking anyone.
This matters more than it sounds. An app you cannot leave is one you should not join, and the RCoA itself tells anaesthetists using non-LLP logbooks to keep a contingency plan.
Same screen: Save a backup. This one is everything, notes and reflections included, and it is the only file that can be restored from. Keep it where you keep anything that matters — your files, a cloud drive, an email to yourself.
The button hands the file to the device rather than dropping it in a downloads folder. On a phone that is the usual share sheet, so iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox and an email to yourself are all one tap away; on a computer you get a Save dialog, and can pick the folder your cloud storage already syncs.
Your logbook lives on that device and nowhere else, so this is the only thing between you and a dropped phone, a cleared browser or a handset that will not switch on. Clerked will remind you on the home screen when it has been a while — please take the reminder seriously.
Install Clerked on the new device, open Settings → Restore from a backup, and choose the file you saved.
A restore adds; it never replaces. Sixty cases on your laptop and twelve on your phone end as seventy-two, not twelve. Restoring the same file twice changes nothing the second time, so it is safe to retry if you are not sure it worked.
There are no accounts yet, so a backup file is how a logbook moves between devices. Signing in on any device is the next thing we are building.
Clerked is free while we build it together. It is being shaped by what anaesthetists actually ask for, so if something is missing, slow, or in the wrong place, please tell me. Accounts and syncing between devices are what we are working on next.