Further details about the way eye care professionals achieve CET points and providers get their CET accredited in next year's cycle have been outlined.
The first major change will be the introduction of approved providers. Those providers who deliver a significant amount of CET, such as Optician, will be able to go through a process of registration as an approved provider to deliver accredited CET. This will be audited by spot checks of material or, for live events, random 'mystery shopper' visits.
Smaller providers delivering the occasional CET event will still need to submit their event to an accreditation process similar to the previous system under Vantage, now to be run under the tender won recently by Replay Learning (News 11.05.12). Self-approving providers will need to show evidence of their rigour in meeting what will be newly defined criteria for accredited CET.
Published CET will prove easier to monitor as it is there for everyone to comment on. Live events, however, will require better feedback from attendees to ensure they meet competency requirements and are not commercially biased or promoting material not within the GOC remit.
Another change sees the cap for text-based distance learning exercises, widely anticipated because of concerns about the ease with which these might be completed without any element of interaction or reflection, set at 18 of the required 36 points in a three-year period. However, distance-learning modalities other than the simple hard copy article with multiple questions appended will be exempt from the cap. It is likely that online lectures, VRICS exercises, and online discussion fora will be acceptable.
Optician will be producing examples in the autumn to allow readers to become familiar with new modalities. The exemption means that apart from the new requirement to undertake a peer review session - Optician will be publishing a peer review programme in the autumn - readers should be able to achieve all their points via the Optician website alongside those points produced through the traditional text medium.