Continuing professional development (CPD) is a feature that exists in many industries around the UK. It was introduced to the health sector with the purpose of improving safety and quality of care provided for patients. Recording CPD has been left with individual doctors to identify their own CPD needs, how to address them and undertake the CPD that will support their professional development and practice.
CPD is an important part of appraisals and needs to be completed to show the necessary learning achieved over the course of the year and ultimately helps you fulfil the requirements for revalidation.
The GMC have not created a standard to record CPD so Doctors can use their own methods, such as CPD diaries setup by various colleges.
The Learning Diary
Our Appraisal toolkit now encompasses the Learning Diary, a free online tool, that is a built to record all aspect of learning.
The Learning Diary allows for CPD to be recorded through a dashboard that enables you to write notes on an event, leave a space for any learning points and gives you the chance to reflect on the learning. The reflection is particularly important in that it helps drive change and ensures the CPD event is effective.
Assigning learning to roles and tags
The Learning Diary also allows you to categorise CPD into different roles that you may undertake such as being a GP and a medical educator. The tags feature on the Learning Diary allows you to further divide roles in order to be more specific about what the learning notes relate to.
Once you have finished creating your tags and roles and assigned appropriate learning to each one you can then explore the analysis page. This page displays the spread of learning across your different scopes of work through various pie charts. It allows you to clearly understand what areas of medical practice you have been participating in and the number of credits they are worth, as well as showing the number of credits and learning notes that aren’t assigned to a role or tag.
Add via email and using our iPhone app
Convenience has always been a priority when the Appraisal toolkit was developed and it features across the Learning Diary as well. By using the email address learning@fourteenfish.com individuals are able to send learning notes to their online account whilst out of the office. Additionally, the Learning Diary iPhone/iPad app* has now been released which creates a space to add and edit learning notes when a computer is not available. The Learning Diary shows convenience in other areas as well such as the integration with the Appraisal toolkit. As all notes are stored on one system they can be imported into your appraisal at the click of a button to ensure a smooth running of the appraisal.
Finally the Learning Diary was to designed to record all types of learning from CPD to PDP to QIA. This was to achieve a comprehensive tool that aids Doctors in various aspects of their work which is crucial for maintaining a high quality of care for patients.
* the Revalidation Toolkit app is available on iTunes. Download the app now
