Continuing Professional Development / Continuing Education (CPD/CE)

CPD

Continual Professional Development (CPD) is:
‘a range of learning activities through which health professionals maintain and develop throughout their career to ensure that they retain their capacity to practice safely, effectively and legally within their evolving scope of practice'. (The Allied Health Professions Project 'Demonstrating competence through CPD)

Why CPD?

Regularly participating in CPD activities allows us to continue to learn and develop throughout our careers. Our skills and knowledge must be kept up to date to ensure that we are able to work safely, legally and effectively. This is essential in order to maintain high levels of competence within our scope of practice and to enable us to competently expand our scope of practice. By doing this we will benefit ourselves, our service and our service user. It is also important for many health professionals continuing professional registration.

What is CPD?

CPD is the participation in a range of learning activities that are relevant to current or future practice. In relation to Physiopedia that might be reading an article or contributing to an article.  It is a continually reflective process that encourages you to learn from your experiences and implement this learning in your practice. CPD experiences should be evidenced and recorded in a professional portfolio which can then be used to share with others or be drawn upon to produce other documents such as a CV, profile or statement.

The CPD Process

CPD can consist of planned events such as a course or it can occur as unplanned work based learning experiences such as a critical incident. As a planned event it will involve the identification of learning needs, the setting of learning outcomes and the making of an action plan to achieve these. Unplanned experiences will occur naturally during your practice. Where these incidents lead to reflection and learning then they can also be considered as a valuable part of your CPD. Any new learning should then be incorporated into your practice which will lead further learning experiences to make a cyclical learning process.

CPD Portfolio

Using a portfolio to record the experience will encourage your reflection and learning as well as building evidence to support your professional development.

Link to free CPD Portfolio

Proformas

User Proforma (link to word doc) - use this proforma if you have learnt from reading physiopedia.

Contributer Proforma (link to word doc) - use this proforma if you have learnt by contributing to physiopedia