We are coming up to annual renewal time for the RCVS and all veterinary professionals need to declare that they have completed the required hours of Continued Professional Development (CPD).
Despite the proliferation of virtual and live events, it can be difficult for some members of the team to access enough CPD for the year. This more difficult now the obligation is to maintain it annually not over a three year average. For team members who are struggling, it is worth remembering that in-house CPD can count towards your professional CPD.
Examples of In-house CPD
- Continuous or Quality Improvement meetings – make sure your team are recording these in their 1CPD app.
- Clinical discussions – you can record clinical discussions with colleagues and specialist.
- Writing/researching for new protocols. This takes time but it is time well spent. Scheduling an occasional CPD day off for your team members to research and compile quality protocols is a fantastic use of CPD budget. Just make sure that this time gets claimed.
- If your team members are struggling with the process of creating protocols, consider enrolling them on a course like those offered by Oncore online learning. They run assessed courses which facilitate the development of protocols and are an excellent way to develop these skills in your team.
- In-house courses and ‘lunch and learn’ meetings count as CPD. Issuing your team members with digital CPD certificates for these events. It will enhance their perceived value and reminds your team members to claim them.
- In addition, in-house training as part of your practice training programme can also be claimed as CPD.
For many businesses in-house training is not very tangible and so difficult to claim. However, Training-Progress have a method of allocating a CPD time to any task in the training programme. We have also just released a new In-house CPD report, which allows you to download a report for your in-house CPD hours for any given year. This report can then be attached to your OneCPD claim, making it easy to claim in-house training as CPD.
Can you Track external CPD on Training-Progress?
We are occasionally asked if Training-Progress features a CPD tracker of external CPD. The simple answer in no. The reason is, that to do so, team members would have to duplicate the admin work of claiming CPD. Training-Progress would be an additional step in to completing the RCVS 1CPD log. For some team members it is a struggle to get them to compete one log, let alone two. You would run the risk of creating unnecessary tension, thereby reducing compliance.
As an employer, however, you can ask your team members to share their 1CPD record with you. This is simply achieved via the 1CPD online.
You can then store this information in the team member documents area of Training-Progress so that you have a record of it.
So, coming up to renewal time, why not remind your team members that their in-house CPD can count towards their professional CPD requirements, and consider lending them a hand by investing in Training-Progress to deliver them a consistent training programme which can be claimed as professional CDP.