Continuing Professional Development (CPD) refers to a number of educational activities that health professionals undertake to maintain, develop and enhance the knowledge, skills, professional performance, and relationships they use to provide care for patients and the public. (Institute of Medicine, 2010). It addresses not only the clinical domain, but also additional professional practice competencies (communication, collaborative and professional), it emphasizes self-directed lifelong learning and learning from practice.
The goal of CPD programme is to keep the practitioners competent, compassionate and confident throughout their career and to augment patient care, outcome and patient satisfaction by setting standards for good medical practice. It helps to reassure the patients and public about the care they are receiving from their medical and dental practitioners.
All medical and dental practitioners registered with Nepal Medical Council need to participate in CPD except in certain conditions specifically mentioned by NMC.
A practitioner interested in participating in CPD can keep himself informed of CPD activities conducted by the hospital s/he is working at, local or national professional association or medical colleges and training programmes being organized by different units of Ministry of Health. Interested practitioner will have to take necessary steps (e.g. applying or registering for the CPD activity) to participate in these activities and make a record of successful participation. Once the participation is completed, the participants need to inform NMC through CPD website about such participation and get credit points for it.
- All the CPD providers have been informed by Nepal Medical Council about the process of CPD organization and registration. The CPD provider institutions will register their activities with NMC and receive approval of Accreditation Unit of NMC CPD Committee.
- The CPD providers will record the participant details including the NMC registration number while conducting the CPD programme. After the successful completion of the CPD programme, the CPD providers will upload the list of participants along with their NMC registration number.
- CPD participants, to ensure that their participation has been registered with NMC, can upload the scanned copies of the certificates they had received at the end of the CPD programme.
See more about cpd in part 2