5 Steps to Complete Your Medical Continued Professional Development (CPD) Portfolio

Maintaining your CPD is simple and easy – here are five steps to your perfect CPD

Planning your CPD

Every medical staff is responsible for choosing their own CPD activities. One must identify and choose their professional needs and improvement that is relevant to their practice.

Things you need to consider while planning your CPD

• Consider your whole practice profession both in clinical and non-clinical aspects including your management skills, research, teaching and training responsibilities.
• Consider the need of change and upgrade in your roles and responsibilities throughout your career path along with new medical knowledge and practice.
• These activities can be formal and informal thus be prepared to grab the opportunities on daily basis. This is one sound CPD forms that will directly link your work to the reflection.
• Your CPD must always be guided by the basic to improve patient care, preserve safety and professionalism. Thus, you must consider your patient’s needs, work environment, your organization or employer and the team you are working with.
• The tools that will help you classify your CPD activities could be your annual appraisal, job planning and Personal Development Plan (PDP). This can also help you in identifying your career needs.

Reflecting your CPD

Reflecting is a description about a situation, event or experience. It shows your behavioural approach on how you perform in the situation, showing how good you are and in practice. It is a key to an effective CPD. The results and feedback from patients and colleagues are the main source of your reflective.

After getting the reflections, you have to call for a discussion about them with an appraiser or a confirmer to acknowledge the need of change and upgrade in your practice. It’s important that you include what you have learnt and its impact on your performance and practice.

Content of your CPD

The whole concept of CPD is continuing education and skills to develop professional competency and performance. After discussion with your appraiser, you can determine the content of your CPD including your Professional Development Plan (PDP). You will be provided with a Framework with domains and attributes. You do not need to match up your CPD with all the domains and attributes but some chosen few. Those domains are

1. Knowledge, skills and performance
2. Safety and quality
3. Communication, partnership and teamwork
4. Maintaining trust

If you have specific undertakings during the time of registration on the subject that matters to your Fitness to Practice, your CPD will not be recommended.

Organizing your CPD

There is no fix way to do CPD activity. You have all the opportunity to organize your own CPD activity and Professional Development Plan. You can select your learning needs, ways of learning them and explore your interested subject for your CPD. These activities can take place on and off clinic and can be local, national or international level. It’s good if you set out how that particular activity helped you learn and later discuss it with your relevant colleagues.

Some of the CPD also relates to your work related behaviour i.e. your communication skills, partnership and teamwork. Some CPD activities aim to improve your team performance for qualitative results of the organization. You can also have peer-based activities where you discuss and disseminate your learning to your colleagues of your specialty or field of work.

Recording your CPD

Keeping a record of your reflection is a part of your CPD. It includes your learning needs, CPD activities and its outcomes with all information about what, when, how, it happened. You should not disclose any personal information of people relating in it. It will help you in validating your learning and support while discussing with your appraiser or confirmer. Their evidential forms are compulsory for your annual appraisal and revalidation.

Lots of medical institution can help you manage your CPD on online portfolio or other tools. It’s your responsibility to make sure that your CPD activities are