CPD at your fingertips

Continued Professional Development (CPD) has always been an integral part of the College’s member offer, and this year the College has developed a new approach to ensure all members are getting the most out of their professional home.

Discussing the importance of CPD, Professor Margaret Ikpoh, RCGP Vice Chair of Professional Development and Standards, said: “GPs are lifelong learners; we always want to keep up-to-date and there are always innovations in treatment and care happening.  We have a duty, for both patient safety and experience, to be fully informed of how best to manage their health and get the best outcomes for them. If I was seeing a healthcare professional, I would want to be confident that they were using the best, most current evidence for my care to make sure I was getting the right treatment.”

Last year, the College embarked on a review of its CPD offer for its members, to ensure that it was meeting their needs and providing value for their membership. “The College is our members’ professional home,” Margaret explained, “and we need to both welcome new members and look after current members.  So, we must ensure CPD is evolving with our membership and remains valuable for them.

“We know many, so members really appreciate the CPD options that we have, but we realised not enough of them were accessing this excellent training and support. We started by exploring the barriers to access and seeing how we could reach more people.

 “Our vision is for the College to be the real market leader in this area as we have so much insight and expertise. We started on this transformational project to make it more accessible – we want CPD at our members’ fingertips,” she said.

The College has committed to investing time, money and resources into the digital learning experience, looking closely at how it can be easier to access and easier to use, with key changes to the digital platform coming soon.

The College has also looked at the expanding the content it is providing. “The key is making sure our training has something relevant for GPs at all career stages,” Margaret explained, “For example, we launched a free two-part webinar on the Simulated Consultation Assessment (SCA), which GP registrars are already telling us they find really useful. And we introduced a free webinar to support GP trainers. We had to be mindful of the administrative burden GP trainers already face and make sure our learning was as accessible and user friendly as possible.”

Margaret points to the relaunch of the One Day Essentials courses as another key success of this new approach. One Day Essentials are full-day online clinical conferences, developed and delivered by leading experts in the field. They are delivered live but are available ‘on demand’ too. The conferences cover key topics from the GP curriculum, such as women’s health, and provide essential information and practical tips to improve practice and patient outcomes. These have been made free to members since June this year.

Margaret noted: “We have seen members signing up to these courses in their thousands, in much higher numbers than we have seen in the past. They are proving really popular and feedback suggests members are finding them beneficial.”

The College has also launched new ‘Hot Topics’ for the Essential Knowledge Update (EKU) programme, which takes GPs through new or changing knowledge relating to key clinical areas and best practice, often exploring timely topics that are top of the public agenda.

“We want to make sure we are widening the door to CPD, so all of our members are able to access learning in a way that works for them and their career,” said Margaret.