Continuous Professional Development (CPD)
Continuing professional development (CPD) is the way in which our registrants continue to learn and develop throughout their careers, so that they keep their knowledge and skills up to date and are able to practise safely and effectively. We set our CPD Standards that every registrant should meet, to ensure that their activities are effective.
CPD helps you maintain or develop your competence and fitness to practise, whether your development needs are:
- for the purposes of your role or profession;
- required by your employer;
- required to meet a specific career goal; or
- aspirational, to meet your own personal goals.
CPD is an important and essential requirement for registration with the AHCS. If you do not maintain your CPD, you will be removed from the register.
To fulfil the requirement, as a HCS Practitioner Registrant, you must:
- Keep a structured record of your continuing professional development (CPD) activity to evidence how you maintain and update your knowledge, understanding and skills in line with changing needs in patient care and service delivery, developments in the evidence base, technological advances, and your job role;
- Undertake CPD activities that are a mixture of learning activities relevant to your current or future practice;
- Ensure that your CPD has contributed to the quality of your professional practice;
- When requested and in a format specified by the Registrar, present a CPD portfolio (a written record, with evidence, of your CPD activities and their impact on your professional practice) explaining how you have met the standards for CPD.
Each year, we audit a random sample of our registrants to make sure our standards are being met. If you are selected for CPD audit, we will write to you and ask you to send us information showing how you have met the CPD standards over the previous two years. The AHCS Registration Rules also allow for the AHCS Registrar to send a notice to a you, at any time, requiring you to submit your continuing professional development record for inspection within 21 days of the notice.
Full information can be found in the AHCS Standards of continuing professional development. We have also produced the AHCS CPD Guide which offers guidance on how to keep a record of your CPD activities and the types of activity that are acceptable.
