Over the past 5 years, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has
developed continuing professional development (CPD) as its key
contribution to promoting lifelong learning. At its core, CPD
requires psychiatrists to maintain, develop and remedy any deficits
in the knowledge and skills relevant to their professional
work.
Participation in CPD is central to maintaining standards
within clinical governance and has a key role in revalidation. The
CPD Committee has radically reformulated its programme to enable
psychiatrists to demonstrate that they are using CPD effectively
and to use their CPD record within the portfolio of evidence
required by the Government's proposal for annual National Heath
Service (NHS) appraisal (in England) and General Medical Council
(GMC) revalidation.
In the past, CPD has been a retrospective generic and
relatively unstructured point-gathering exercise. The College
considers that individual psychiatrists should in future preplan
their CPD activities to ensure their relevance to the work they do.
The Court of Electors has endorsed the decision of the CPD
Committee that, with effect from 1 April 2001, personal development
plans (PDPs) will be introduced as the mechanism for achieving CPD
objectives.
A PDP is a series of personal statements linked to the
individual objectives that the psychiatrist has identified, which
will help to improve the quality of the care that he or she
provides. The PDP will allow the doctor to record evidence of the
steps he or she has taken to assess, define, test with peers and
achieve his or her personal CPD objectives. Evidence that a CPD
cycle has been completed will form a key part of the PDP. Adoption
of PDPs will provide a focus for CPD to be used in a
forward-looking way that focuses on the needs, roles and activities
of individual psychiatrists. The CPD programme will be prospective
and capable of supporting psychiatrists in striving for excellence
in practice that is beyond the standards that may be formally
required by employers or by government.
The other key element of the new CPD system is participation
in a peer group. The purpose of the peer group is to review each
member's PDP, ensure its appropriateness and identify practical
ways in which the agreed objectives can be met. The peer group will
meet regularly (at least twice a year) and individual PDPs will be
reviewed and amended iteratively. Peer groups will be
self-selected; group size will usually be between three and six but
may be as few as two or as many as eight.
Members of peer groups may be colleagues working in the same
organisation, from within the same psychiatric speciality or they
could be colleagues from outside a single health care organisation.
What matters is that each individual has available objective
opinion and support against which to test his or her plan and
monitor progress in settings that permit a positive culture for
learning. The peer group should provide a supportive, rather than a
critical environment for each of its members. The group should
provide ideas and be imaginative in helping each individual to
overcome barriers in the achievement of objectives. Peers must
strive to make each other feel secure enough to discuss openly
positive abilities, progress and achievements, as well as any
problems, gaps and mistakes, and learn from them.
Individuals should take responsibility for undertaking
sufficient preparatory work on drafting their own PDP prior to
discussion within the peer group. The information generated during
peer group meetings should also be recorded in the plan. Ideally,
each member of the group should use a similar format for this
process and the recording mechanism should allow colleagues'
advice, the agreed plan for CPD activities, progress and
achievement at the year-end to be documented.
Suggested forms for developing and recording a PDP together
with a checklist of issues, processes and outcomes that
psychiatrists might wish to review are discussed in part 2 and
appear on pp. 25-26 and 44-56 of this report. At the conclusion of
a PDP cycle, the peer group will sign off or internally validate a
PDP summary sheet for each participant. This sheet will then be
submitted to the Royal College of Psychiatrists for external
validation.