If You Don't Treat Patients
All doctors registered with the Medical Council - thus retaining the right to practice medicine - have a legal obligation to maintain their professional competence.
If you are not in clinical practice (for example, in a full-time management or research role or retired and working part-time) fulfilling the Internal CPD and Clinical (Practice) Audit/Quality Improvement requirement can be more challenging.
However, we have some suggestions as to how you can achieve the minimum requirements.
Define your scope of practice
A key point to remember is that the Professional Competence Scheme framework is based on self-directed learning and that the activities you record must reflect your current scope of practice.
Some activities may not be immediately identifiable as attracting CPD credit, but if you have clearly defined your scope of practice it should be relatively simple to map what you do in your practice to the Professional Competence Scheme framework.
Gathering CPD
Credits are calculated as 1 hour = 1 credit.
Doctors in non-clinical practice can achieve CPD credits by:
- Involvement with your RCPI Training Body, for example:
- Exam question setting/writing
- Mentoring SpRs /recently appointed specialists
- Participation in committees
- Hospital/training site inspections
- Meetings in connection with research projects
- Meetings in connection with national guidelines or policies
- Training/orientation sessions in connection with your RCPI role
- Involvement in volunteer or outreach activities
- Forming a journal club with other doctors in your area of practice. Articles relating to your activities could be discussed
- Regular meetings related to your practice can be treated as the non-clinical equivalent of multi-disciplinary team meetings/case meetings
- If you are teaching or acting in a professional advisory capacity, then the meetings, presentations or reviews that relate to that role can be recorded in the internal category
- Peer review groups
- Meetings to discuss patient incident reviews or medico-legal cases
- Chart reviews that commonly occur in medico-legal practice
- Attending case presentations
- Attending meetings that relate to your current role
RCPI Knowledge Base:
Ways to gather CPD credit