Choosing a logbook for emergency medicine.

What you actually have to evidence

Two things. Procedures, with the level of supervision you had. POCUS scans, counted against the RCEM target for each modality. Both are measured against the goals for your stage, not just totalled.

Kaizen holds your assessments, your reflections and your SLO and Key Capability mapping, and it does track progress towards procedure goals. What it does not do is separate POCUS goals from procedure goals, and it is not somewhere you log a case in seconds mid-shift.

ARCP panels also tend to ask for the logbook as a document in its own right, so the export has to be current.

The three ways people do it

A spreadsheet. Free and flexible. You build the curriculum structure, you format the export, and nothing stops patient-identifiable detail creeping in. Your backup is wherever the file lives.

A general medical logbook app. Most are built around surgery or anaesthetics, and most charge. The procedure lists are not RCEM specific, so you translate between their taxonomy and your curriculum.

A purpose-built emergency medicine logbook. RCEM lists for your stage, supervision recorded the way the college expects, POCUS kept separate with its own targets. This is LogEM.

Six questions worth asking of any of them

• Does it carry your curriculum? ACCS, intermediate and higher have different procedure lists. If it lumps them together, it will not tell you where you stand.
• Does it record supervision the way RCEM does? Direct, indirect and independent, per encounter, not a single yes or no.
• Is POCUS separate? Ultrasound counts against per-modality targets. A generic procedure count cannot show that.
• Where does the clinical data live? Ask whether entries are uploaded, who can read them, and what happens if the company folds.
• Can you get your data out? Look for a structured export, not just a PDF.
• What does it cost, and for how long? Check whether the free tier caps entries, and what happens to your data if you stop paying.

Where LogEM fits

LogEM is the only logbook app built specifically for emergency medicine trainees, and the only one built by a working emergency medicine trainee.

Three curricula: ACCS, intermediate and higher. Supervision as direct, indirect or independent, per encounter. POCUS tracked on its own against the RCEM targets. An entry takes seconds on shift, and so does checking what you are short of before one.

It is built around the RCEM curriculum, so trainees come first. It also suits EM doctors in non-training posts, anyone on the Portfolio Pathway, still widely called CESR, and anyone building evidence for an EM application.

Entries stay on the phone. Nothing reaches a deanery, the GMC or an ePortfolio provider unless you export it and send it yourself. Export to PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON, and the JSON is a full structured copy that doubles as your backup.

Free. Unlimited entries, unlimited exports, no cap, no trial. Import takes CSV, Excel and Word tables, so an existing spreadsheet comes across in one go.

On the App Store as Emergency Medicine Log: LogEM, published by Thomas Phillip Porter.

Where LogEM does not fit

• Other specialties. The procedure lists are RCEM's. An anaesthetics or surgical trainee will be fighting it.
• Not an ePortfolio. No workplace-based assessments, no reflections, no SLO or Key Capability mapping, and it does not submit to Kaizen.
• iPhone only today. Android is in preparation. There is no web version and no desktop app.
• It will not write your reflections. It counts what you did.

Which one should you use?

If your spreadsheet is current and exports cleanly, keep it. What matters at ARCP is that the record is complete.

If you have no logbook, or one you have not opened in months, choose on how long an entry takes on shift. A logbook you do not fill in is worth nothing. That is what LogEM is built for.