General Dental Council and Enhanced CPD by Rajeev Shah Digitising Dental CPD

The aims of this article are

• To introduce the GDC’s enhanced CPD scheme
• To discuss the reasons for its introduction
• To explain how the transition will work

The learning objectives of this article are enable you to

• Understand the GDC’s enhanced CPD scheme
• Recognise which types of CPD will be acceptable

This article is suitable for all members of the dental team and it is worth 1 hour of verified CPD.

It addresses the High Level Learning Outcome of Maintenance in Field of Practice and is relevant to the CQC outcome covered by Leadership.

In 2018, the GDC will replace the current CPD scheme with its new Enhanced CPD Scheme.

The new scheme contains a number of new requirements; these changes will affect all GDC registrants and from January 2018 for dentists and August 2018 for DCPs.

Background
Under the current CPD scheme, the GDC simply looks at the number of hours that you have logged over the 5-year cycle. Annual declarations have not been mandatory and no attention is paid to whether CPD is undertaken regularly through the cycle.

Whilst the regulator provides a list of ‘highly recommended’ and ‘recommended’ topics, under current legislation, it does not consider whether the CPD you undertake is relevant to your individual circumstances. There has also, to date, been no regard to the quality of the CPD undertaken.

This has lead to a large amount of variable-quality CPD being made available on the market, with many dental professionals making their CPD decisions based entirely on cost rather than quality or relevance.

The Enhanced CPD Scheme is intended to correct this situation and ensure that CPD activity is firmly embedded in the professional lives of dental professionals. It is intended to support registrants in doing CPD regularly, in accordance with professional standards and within their current scope of practice.

New requirements
The Enhanced CPD Scheme provides a framework for dental professionals to follow which may be summarised under the 4 headings Plan, Do, Reflect, Record.

Plan
Under the new scheme all registrants are required to maintain a professional development plan (PDP). This will enable you to evaluate your learning and development needs, in accordance with the GDC’s standards and your own scope of practice.

You may incorporate practice goals, feedback from colleagues, and information from sources such as patient feedback, complaints, audit, significant event analysis, and peer review processes. If you have annual appraisals at work, for example, some of your plans will surface from those discussions.

Your PDP is expected to evolve throughout your cycle so you should consider it a ‘living document’.

Do
As your learning needs are identified through the process of creating your PDP, your CPD choices should now be made to meet those needs. Under the new scheme

• only verifiable CPD will be accepted
• you must make annual declarations
• you must declare at least 10 hours of CPD over two consecutive years

In an effort to encourage and enforce the requirement for CPD to be undertaken regularly, annual declarations will be mandatory. Whilst a declaration in one year may be for zero hours, there is a minimum requirement of 10 hours in any two consecutive years.

Reflect
After you’ve completed a CPD activity, you’ll need to reflect on its impact by considering how it has or will enable you to maintain and develop your skills.

These reflections may occur over different timescales. For example, immediately after the activity you may reflect upon what you have learnt and how you intend to implement the lessons into your practice. At various periods afterwards, you may reflect on how well the implementations went and how your real-world outcomes have differed from your expectations.

Record
Your CPD Record will need to include your PDP, details of the CPD activities undertaken, independently verifiable evidence (usually in the form of a certificate), your reflective notes and any measurements of outcomes that you have made.

Verifiable CPD and quality controls
In the new scheme, the GDC will only accept verifiable CPD. The criteria for verifiable CPD has changed, in order to put an onus on CPD providers to assure quality. There are a number of quality-assurance frameworks in existence and the ‘gold standard’ has been created by the Committee of Postgraduate Dental Deans and Directors (COPDEND).

Your CPD provider is expected to provide you with full transparency with regard to the framework used and to provide supporting documentation that is open to scrutiny by the GDC whenever required, for example, if your CPD is audited by the regulator as part of its routine inspections.

GDC high-level learning outcomes
As well as moving towards all CPD being verified, the enhanced scheme requires that your CPD relates to at east one of the GDC’s high level learning outcomes.

These outcomes are synthesised from the GDC’s Standard for the Dental Team and there are 4 of them.

1. Effective communication with patients, the dental team, and others across dentistry, including when obtaining consent, dealing with complaints, and raising concerns when patients are at risk
2. Effective management of self, and effective management of others or effective work with others in the dental team, in the interests of patients at all times; providing constructive leadership where appropriate
3. Maintenance and development of knowledge and skill within your field of practice
4. Maintenance of skills, behaviours and attitudes which maintain patient confidence in you and the dental profession and put patients’ interests first

Managing the transition
If the start of your new CPD cycle coincides with the start of the new scheme, then your transition is straight-forward as your requirements will be based entirely upon the table above.

However, if you are part-way through a cycle in 2018 then your cycle will become a hybrid of the two schemes and your requirements will be pro-rated. In other words, you’ll need to fulfil all of the verifiable and non-verifiable requirements for each year that you were in the old scheme as well as the verifiable requirements for each year that you are in the new scheme.

Dentist’s annual requirements in the old scheme are 15 verified and 35 unverified hours

DCP’s annual requirements in the old scheme are 10 verified and 25 unverified hours

Examples
Consider a hygienist who starts the third year of his or her cycle in August 2018 and has so far logged 10 verified plus 25 unverified hours in year 1 and 0 verified plus 15 unverified hours in year 2.

For the rest of this cycle, it’s necessary to complete 10 hours of unverified CPD plus a further 65 hours of verified CPD and at least 10 verified hours MUST be logged in Year 3.

Now consider a dentist who will be starting the 4th year of his or her cycle in January 2018 and has logged 50 verified hours in year 1, and no unverified hours, 50 verified hours in year 2 and no unverified hours, and 0 hours in year 3.

For the rest of this cycle, it’s necessary to complete 10 hours of verified CPD in year 4 plus 105 hours of unverified CPD.

Embrace the change
These are big changes which are going to be implemented quickly. It may seem overbearing at first but you’ll reap significant benefits if you approach it with a positive attitude.

Carefully planned and executed CPD will improve your working life, enhance patient care and open new career pathways for you.

On a person level, when you pay attention to your CPD, job satisfaction becomes a choice and career development becomes a reality

Your continuing development covers more than just clinical skills. Use it to develop self-awareness, self-confidence and all aspects of your own personal development and these improvements will be reflected in all that you do.

This article meets the parameters for verified CPD and you can claim your certificate by registering and logging in at https://dental.cpdpro.org.uk.

CPD hours
The minimum number of hours required per cycle depends on your professional title. Remember that you must also ensure that you declare at least 10 hours during any 2-year period, regardless of how many hours you may have done during the cycle.

Rajeev Shah, Digitising Dental CPD