The 5 Pieces of Practice-Related Feedback (NMC Revalidation)

The feedback requirement is the smallest of the eight in terms of paperwork (five pieces over three years works out to roughly one every seven months), but it’s the requirement registrants most often arrive at unprepared. Most clinical feedback gets received, processed and forgotten without being recorded. By the time revalidation comes around, the source is hard to recover.

This chapter covers the rules and the practical habit that fixes the problem before it happens.

What “practice-related feedback” means

The NMC’s definition is straightforward: feedback that relates to your nursing practice. It can be:

• Positive (“thank you for your kindness with my dad”).
• Constructive (“you could have explained the medication better”).
• Critical (“the handover was rushed and I missed information”).

It can come from:

• Patients and their families.
• Colleagues at any level: nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, support workers.
• Students you’re supervising or mentoring.
• Managers and supervisors.
• Practice educators.
• Service users in non-clinical settings (children in a school nursing role, for example).

It can arrive as:

• Written: thank-you cards, emails, formal compliments, complaint responses, appraisal commentary, survey results.
• Verbal: spoken feedback you’ve written down with a date and source.
• Group: team feedback in a debrief, MDT acknowledgement.
• Anonymous: patient survey results, NHS Friends and Family Test responses, anonymised 360-degree feedback.

The breadth of what counts is wider than most registrants realise. The problem is rarely “I haven’t had feedback in three years”. It’s “I didn’t keep a record of any of it”.

What the NMC submission actually asks for

In NMC Online, the feedback section asks for five entries. Each entry has:

• A date.
• A source category (patient, colleague, manager, etc.).
• A brief description of the feedback content.
• A note on how the feedback influenced your practice.

You don’t submit the original feedback. The submission is your summary. The originals, if you have them, sit in your evidence folder for audit.

What audit auditors look for

If your submission is audited, the auditor reads your five entries and may ask for the underlying evidence. They’re looking for:

• Plausibility: does this look like real feedback from real sources?
• Variety: is all five from the same source on the same theme, or is there a range?
• Practice link: does the entry actually describe what the feedback was and how it touched your practice?
• Dates: are the dates inside the three-year window and reasonably spread?

The most common audit query is when all five pieces of feedback are dated within the last six weeks. That’s a tell-tale sign of last-minute gathering rather than ongoing collection.

The habit that fixes the problem

The shift that prevents feedback being a revalidation panic: record every piece of practice-related feedback in real time. A simple text file or note works.

The format that satisfies the audit:

Date: 12 March 2025
Source: Patient (relative, daughter of inpatient on Ward 12)
Content: "Thank you for sitting with mum when she was anxious before the procedure. The anaesthetist said you'd already explained it properly. It made the whole day easier."
Practice impact: Reinforced the time investment of pre-procedural anxiety reduction. I'm now consistently allocating 5 minutes before invasive procedures even on busy days.

Four lines, takes 90 seconds to write, audit-grade. If you write one of these every six to eight weeks you’ll arrive at revalidation with substantially more than five. Pick the five that show the most variety and the strongest practice impact.

Where to find feedback you’ve already had

If you’re approaching revalidation and don’t have records, look in three places.

Your inbox. Patient thank-you emails, colleague acknowledgements, manager praise emails, course feedback addressed to you. Anything dated within the cycle is valid.

Your appraisal documentation. Annual appraisals usually include feedback from peers, managers and sometimes patients. Extract the relevant feedback as one of your five.

Your trust’s patient experience data. Friends and Family Test responses mentioning you by name, complaint responses that named you, formal compliments logged by the trust. The patient experience team can usually pull these.

A nurse who hasn’t been recording feedback can usually assemble five from these three sources alone. The audit is satisfied by valid feedback, not by perfect collection habits.

What feedback isn’t sufficient

A few categories that don’t meet the requirement:

• Generic NHS staff survey responses that didn’t mention you specifically.
• Feedback to your team that wasn’t specifically about your contribution.
• Self-reflection presented as feedback (e.g., “I felt I did a good job here”, which is reflection, not feedback).
• Feedback from before the three-year window.
• Hearsay: “my manager told me a patient said X”. You need the original source.

The boundary is: feedback came from someone other than you, was about your nursing practice specifically, was within the three-year window, and you can describe it accurately.

How feedback connects to reflection

Two pieces of feedback per reflective account is the rough pattern most registrants use. The five reflective accounts (covered in Chapter 17) often respond to the feedback. You write a reflection about what the feedback prompted, how you reviewed your practice, what you changed.

Strong revalidation submissions tend to have feedback and reflective accounts that connect: feedback prompts reflection, reflection prompts change, change shows up in future feedback. The audit reads them as a story when they’re linked, which is the strongest signal of ongoing learning.

The next chapter walks through how to ask for feedback when you need it, including templates for asking patients, colleagues and managers without it feeling forced.