Putting your CPD profile together

The main parts of your CPD profile will be:

• a summary of your practice history for the last two years (up to 500 words);
• a statement of how you have met our standards of CPD (up to 1500 words); and
• evidence to support your statement.

Writing the summary of your practice history
Your summary should describe your role and the type of work you do. The summary should include your main responsibilities, identify the specialist areas you work in and identify the people you communicate and work with most.

It may be appropriate to base this part of your CPD profile on your job description. When you have written your statement about how you meet our standards for CPD (see the following explanation), you may find it helpful to go back over your summary of work, to make sure that it clearly explains how your CPD activities are relevant to your future or current work.

Writing your statement
When you write your statement, we expect you to concentrate most on how you meet standards 3 and 4 – how your CPD activities improve the quality of your work and the benefits to service users.

Below, we have suggested how you might want to approach writing your
statement.

Using your personal development plan
We know that not all health professionals have a personal development plan – you may be self-employed, or your employer may not work in this way. But if you do have a personal development plan, you may find it useful to use this as a starting point for writing your statement. If you do not already have a personal development plan, you may find it useful to develop one and to use this approach.

Most personal development plans involve identifying:

• learning needs;
• learning activities;
• types of evidence; and
• what you have learnt.

You could write a statement on how you have you updated your knowledge and skills over the last two years, and what learning needs you have met. You may find it helpful to identify three to six points that have contributed to the quality of your work.

These areas will have been identified through your personal development plan or a review of your role or performance. If you have a personal development plan, you can provide this as part of your evidence.

If you run your own private practice, and you have a business development plan or a similar document, then you may find this a useful starting point for writing your own statement.

Using the standards
If you do not have a personal development plan, or if you would prefer to use another approach to write your statement, you could start with our standards. Using the information we have provided about our standards for CPD, write about how you have met each one. You could split your statement into sections, and dedicate each section to one of our standards.

Your supporting evidence
You do not need to send us the full record of all your CPD activities. In fact, we strongly encourage you not to do so. You may send us a summary of all your activities, but this summary should be only a sheet or two with a very brief list of activities and dates.

If you are chosen for audit, you need to look through your entire record of CPD activities and consider which activities best show how you have met our standards. This should be a mixture of activities that are directly linked to your current or future work, and you should consider how you can provide evidence that these activities have improved your work, and benefited service users. In all cases, evidence of how you have planned your CPD, what activities you have undertaken, and the effects that this had on how you work and the effects on
your service users, will all be helpful to the assessors.

When you put together your profile, you also need to send in evidence to support your personal statement.

Examples of evidence of CPD

Amount of evidence needed
In your personal record of CPD activities you may have a large amount of evidence relating to certain activities. However, you do not need to send us all of this information. You need to look at the information you have, decide which activities show how you meet our standards, and then decide what evidence to send to us. You should refer to the assessment criteria in our document, Continuing professional development and your registration

Make sure you have provided relevant supporting information to show how you meet each of the standards. We do not have detailed guidelines on how much evidence you should send us. But you should bear in mind that the CPD assessors will need to see enough information to be sure that the CPD activity has taken place.

Sample profiles are available here

Related Documents

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