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.