Over the last 5 years, the Royal College of Psychiatrists
has developed CPD as its key contribution to promoting life-long
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 may have 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 NHS
appraisal (in England) and GMC revalidation.
In the past, CPD was a retrospective generic and relatively
unstructured point-gathering exercise. The College considers that
individual psychiatrists should now preplan their CPD activities to
ensure their relevance to the work they do. With effect from 1st
April, 2001, Personal Development Plans (PDPs) were 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 they provide. 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,
prospective way that focuses on the needs, roles and activities of
individual psychiatrists. The CPD programme is now 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
should 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 2 or as many as eight. Members of peer groups may
be colleagues working in the same organisation, from within the
same psychiatric specialty or they could be colleagues from outside
a single healthcare organisation. What matters is that each
individual has available objective opinion and support against
which to test their 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 all
the members. The group should provide ideas and be imaginative in
helping each individual to overcome barriers to achieving
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. The College will
supply a suggested proforma for developing and recording a PDP
together with a checklist of issues, processes and outcomes that
psychiatrists might wish to review. 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 should then be
submitted to the Royal College of Psychiatrists for external
validation.
Psychiatrists should transfer to the PDP system as soon as
possible, but by mid 2002 at the latest. The College will
externally validate PDP summary sheets and audit a sample of full
PDPs. 20 hours of external and 30 hours of internal CPD continues
to be the minimum annual requirement for psychiatrists to remain in
good standing for CPD. The College expects this to be supplemented
by 100 hours of reading or other self-directed learning.
Psychiatrists are advised to continue to spread their learning
across a range of types of activity which should be related to
their clinical commitments and relationships.
The revised CPD Policy document
Good
Psychiatric Practice: CPD was distributed to all College
members in June 2001. Further copies may be downloaded from this
site.
Aditionally, draft forms for developing a PDP are available
via
CPD index of this website. Forms A
to D are not compulsory and peer groups may wish to develop their
own format. However, it will be compulsory for form E to be
submitted to the College.