Continuing Professional Development
There are few practitioners or therapists of complementary and alternative medicine who are not actively involved with Continuing Professional Development (CPD) although many are unaware they are doing so. The problem is that much of this professional and personal development is random in occurrence and may be opportunistic in nature. This can mean that individuals are not getting the most from their efforts.
At the ICNM, we aim to help you, the therapist or practitioner to find an effective way to engage with CPD. You should feel comfortable with the process of continued learning and may find that putting some structure into your development enables you to maximise the use of your time, which is a most valuable commodity. CPD can contribute to development of our profession as a whole and to improve the nature and status of individual therapies. CPD will become a requirement for registration, and can help improve client or patient care and welfare through increased learning, understanding and skill development.
What is CPD?
- Continuing - an on-going lifelong process of learning from the point of qualification
- Professional - related to your specific discipline
- Development - activities which facilitate the progress of your own and the profession's credibility and identity
How and when should you undertake CPD
- On a daily basis, through informal activities within your work
- Regularly via meeting with other professionals to network and share ideas
- Intermittently by attending workshops, courses or conferences
- Continually via reflection on practice
Where and when can you undertake CPD activities?
- In the workplace whilst seeing patients/clients
- On the telephone, in e-mails or communication with colleagues
- By post
- In group settings, small informal meetings of large formal events
- In the library
- On the internet
- At home
- In educational settings
Research showed that Individual practitioners need to:
- Record and evaluate their CPD activities
- Undertake CPD in a more structured or managed way
- Make more use of informal or workplace-centred activities
- Prepare for a time when they have to provide evidence of CPD for continued registration
- Following the regulatory process, the time for CPD is NOW
What is a Portfolio?
A portfolio is a document holder (filer with dividers) into which you place evidence of activities and personal reflections. The folder will increase in size as you include more information so you may need to increase the number of folders you have. It does not have to be purchased from an organisation but does need to be well organised and personalised to you.
Requirements
Each discipline may have slightly different nominal hours. The ICNM has discussed with its advisors and the BRCP Registrar and concluded that the requirement for BRCP membership will be 20 hours per year. 50% of this should be discipline specific and 50% can be more generic including reflection or research. From 2007, evidence of on-going CPD will become a requirement for membership renewal. Where CPD has been agreed by a regulatory body, the Registrar will not need to check the CPD again, but will need a copy of the membership renewal to ensure that safety standards are being met.
Some individuals will choose to do more that the required 20 hours. That is a personal decision but additional hours cannot be carried forward from one year to another. CPD should be spot checked to ensure that it is current (up to date) and that it is valid (real).
Where to start
To begin to capture and maximise opportunities for demonstrating CPD, select some time once a week/fortnight in which you think about a range of activities that you are currently involved with. Then ask the following questions:-
- Did I learning anything new from this activity?
- Was I able to change and improve the treatment I gave my client as a result of the activity?
If you answered "Yes" to either of these questions, collect any paperwork associated with the activity or the treatment, make a few notes and put this into your portfolio. At the end of 2 months open the portfolio and see how much information you have placed into the portfolio that can contribute to CPD. Therefore CPD is something that we are already doing; we were just unaware that this was the case.
We consider that the ability to use reflection and evaluation are essential in our work. By reflecting upon our clinical and life experiences, we can consider ways in which we can develop practice. This may be informed by reading, research, observation or others, attendance at conferences or workshops or by receiving treatments from other practitioners. The essence of CPD is to review what has been learnt from the experience and consider how that knowledge or information can be used to inform future practice.
Keeping a Planning Sheet (Page 5) and an activity record sheet (Page 6) may be helpful. Keep the Planning and Activity Record in a portfolio with copies of attendance at workshops and courses with a short reflective statement indicating what you have learnt from attending these events. Your reflections are important. As you become more confident with your reflective writing, you will discover how useful reflection is as a learning tool.
Download CPD Planning Sheet & Activity Record and Review Sheet >
Further reading
Boud D Keough R and Walker D (1988) Reflection: Turning experience into learning Kogan Page, London
Honey P and Mumford A (1992) The Manual of Learning Styles 3rd edition Maidenhead