By the time you read this, there will be just a handful of days remaining to complete your requirement under the General Optical Council’s enhanced CET scheme. This feature hopes to explain the main points about the move from CET to CPD starting next year.
What is happening?
The current requirement to obtain a set number of Continuing Education and Training (CET) points to maintain position on the GOC register ends at midnight New Year’s Eve. The GOC will be closed from 5pm on December 24, 2021 until 9am on January 4, 2022. During that time the GOC will be unavailable to provide assistance with any website issues. However, the MyCET portal will still be open to allow you to confirm any outstanding points, until midnight December 31, 2021, when the cycle will close.
The CET portal will be closed for important maintenance from January 1, 2022 to January 17 when the new Continuing Professional Development (CPD) portal will launch. From that point onwards, GOC registrants will be required to attain a set number of CPD points to stay on the register. Similar to CET, the CPD scheme will follow three-year cycles with an annual requirement for points.
What is CPD?
Continuing professional development requires not just evidence of learning ( à la CET), but evidence of development of skills, new learning and reflection on your professional activity and how it helps patients.
If I was to try to summarise the main difference between CET and CPD, it would be that CPD is based on gathering evidence by each individual registrant of having undertaken a task or experience relevant to their professional role and requires them to log this and show how they have thought about how this affects the way they work. The GOC can then check this log to make sure that each registrant has evidence of them being suitably up to date and having an appropriate level of knowledge and experience to maintain their constantly evolving professional responsibility. Key to this is personal reflection. This shows the GOC how the logged CPD is being put to good use. Gone are the days of simply gathering points to meet a target and then forgetting about them.
In lay terms, CET was provided to registrants who then simply confirmed their CET points after the provider was happy that they had adequately earned the points. With CPD, the onus is on the registrant to show evidence of suitable achievement of activity. This might take the form of CPD points from approved providers (similar to now) or from evidence of completion of their own activity if it conforms to GOC standards. So, the onus is on you, not the provider.
The move to CPD aligns eye care professionals with other health care professions who have undertaken CPD for many years.
What are the new CPD requirements?
The CPD scheme is still a points-based system and, in that respect, is not too different from the enhanced CET scheme we are familiar with. The requirements for each category of registrant (optometrist, dispensing optician and specialist registration categories) are outlined in table 1.
Table one
The main changes are as follows:
- Domains; gone are the competency subjects, and in come domains. There are four of these relating to general practice and an extra specialty domain for therapeutic optometrists and for contact lens opticians (see table 2).
- Personal development plan; at the start of the cycle (so, from January 17), you will be required to complete a personal development plan on MyCPD. A template for this will be provided by the GOC, but the key thing to remember is to record your hoped-for development in the coming years as relevant to your own area of practice. There will be more on this in a forthcoming Optician article in January.
- Reflective exercise; at the end of the cycle (so, by December 2024), it is now a requirement for you to undertake a discussion with a suitable peer (someone of similar registrant category would seem best) to look at what CPD you have undertaken, how your role has developed and influenced the CPD you have undertaken, and to what extent your CPD plan has been followed. Again, look out for future Optician articles on this.
CPD Provision
As shown in table 1, a minimum of half of your CPD points need to come from approved CPD providers. Optician is an approved CPD provider. As such, expect from the start of the new cycle our continuing output of distance learning materials covering the full range of domains. Many of these will be familiar, as they will require completion of some form of test, typically multiple choice questions, and successful completion of this will result in you receiving confirmation from us of this completion along with the relevant C number. It is this that you can then use to log into your MyCPD site as evidence of completion.
Table 2
So, no more accepting points. Instead, you will upload your own evidence of completion of any specific C-numbered CPD activity. Expect other variations of the theme in Optician, for both interactive and distance learning CPD, whereby you will be asked for other evidence of completion of an exercise, such as a summary of a discussion or some short question answers, to allow us to send you proof of completion for you to upload.
Self-Directed CPD
Up to half of your CPD points may come from self-directed CPD. This is where you can log points in 0.5 point steps that reflect the amount of time (in half-hour steps) you have spent doing any particular activity. For example, if you spend an hour or more reading two 4,000-word articles on myopia in Optician, you can then log one point of CPD, as long as you also complete a reflection statement summarising what you gained from the experience.
The GOC strongly advise completion of the reflection statement as soon after completing the task as possible. If your CPD log is audited, it seems reasonable for an auditor to look for actual evidence of having read the two articles.
- Look out for further updates, articles and guidance in the New Year as the scheme launches.