CPD helps you to keep up to date and competent and to maintain the quality of all the work you do, and encourages and supports improvements in practice.
You must carry out CPD activities every year.
Your CPD activities must cover the whole of your practice, and be tailored to your scope of practice and needs.
Your learning needs and plans for your CPD should be reflected in your personal development plan for the coming year.
CPD should focus on outcomes or outputs rather than on inputs.
You must reflect on what you have learned from the activity and how this could help maintain or improve the quality of your practice.
You must reflect on your CPD activities and discuss them at each annual whole practice appraisal.
Remember – ‘quality not quantity’, ‘reflection is essential’ and 'supporting information should cover all aspects of your work’.
Keeping up to date has always been a key professional activity. Most medical Royal Colleges and faculties have published advice on how doctors working in their specialties can demonstrate appropriate CPD across their curriculum and may specify a minimum number of hours or credits. The GMC does not mandate the number of CPD points you should collect for appraisal or revalidation, just that evidence of relevant CPD activity, with reflection is required every year.
You may include any CPD activity in your appraisal folder, but you are not required to include it all. Focus on reflecting on the more significant CPD activity, in particular that which has changed your practice, and that where you might benefit from further discussion with your appraiser.
Your appraiser will want to discuss progress on CPD planned in last year’s PDP.
You should aim to include examples of CPD that cover the breadth of your practice. You need not cover the whole of your practice every year, but over the revalidation cycle you should ensure good spread of activity. Try to avoid focusing every appraisal on a particular area of interest to the exclusion of other areas relevant to your practice.
Using a variety of learning methods can be more effective than restricting your activity to a single method e.g. reading, online learning, team learning, lectures & conferences.
Reflecting on your CPD activity will demonstrate how you keep up to date - maintaining and enhancing the quality of your professional work.
Review of your practice and feedback about the quality of your professional work may identify areas for CPD activity.
If providing a lot of related information such as from reading, online learning, or on a specific clinical topic, consider grouping and summarising your total activity as a list and reflect in detail on 2-3 elements where your learning has been most significant, or where your practice has changed as result of the activity. The focus in your appraisal discussion is less about what you have done, and more about how it has changed your practice, for example, after reflecting on this activity what would I stop doing, continue doing or start doing?