Those maintaining professional registration with the General Optical Council may well still be feeling the warm fuzziness of completing another continuing professional development (CPD) cycle a few weeks back.
One of the new additions to the 2022-25 cycle was a reflective exercise for registrants. The introduction of the exercise, which was made available in July this year when the majority of CPD points for the cycle had been earned, was to create greater insight among registrants into their practice and what may be some areas to focus on during the next three years.
The rationale behind the reflective exercise seems perfectly reasonable, but from reading message boards and Facebook groups in recent months, the process seems to have been the bane of registrants’ existence.
‘Has anyone at the GOC ever considered this might be a complete waste of everyone’s time? Who is going to read through all these and then make a judgement about whether we have done a thorough job of completing a tedious exercise?’ vented one practitioner.
‘Just use Chat GPT,’ suggested one tech-savvy individual. ‘Who is going to read, 30,000 of these?’ noted another.
But it was this anonymous comment that really struck a chord with me. ‘I feel that the system is not so much in place for those of us who are conscientious and who do CPD because we wish to learn and to put that learning to good use. It’s more, I feel, to do with those who do not engage, who will not do CPD and who will fall behind.’
Engagement was a common theme among the feedback I read, with several comments mentioning the repetitive elements of their daily duties not needing such reflective insights.
This made my heart sink a little. I’m not under any illusions about job satisfaction levels within the sector and certainly don’t expect anyone to skip to work every day, but overall, the optometry is a highly rewarding profession.
Self-reflection is likely to help those who feel like they are stuck in a rut by working on the areas that could well add new dynamics to their roles.
