The Board of Directors, at its 16 December 2015 meeting, decided that the College could no
longer accept CPDP certificates or ‘sign offs’ from other College’s CPD programs as
satisfying RCPA requirements. This change will take effect for the 2016 Calendar year,
applying to those CPD returns required by March 2017.
There are a number of reasons for this change.
Firstly, the College is undergoing a major AMC Accreditation review in 2016. Under Section
9.1 of the AMC Standards “Continuing Professional Development” there is a NEW
requirement:
9.1.4 The education provider requires participants to select CPD activities relevant to their
learning needs, based on their current and intended scope of practice within the specialty(s).
The education provider requires specialists to complete a cycle of planning and selfevaluation of learning goals and achievements.
There has also always been a requirement for “recency” of practice as part of your annual
medical registration renewal.
In order for the College and for you to comply with these requirements in terms of laboratory
medicine, you will need to have both recency of practice and CPD relevant to your scope of
laboratory practice. If you have both clinical and laboratory clinical practices, you should
comply separately for these two areas of your practice, however the College cannot
mandate what other Colleges may require of you.
Secondly, the Medical Board of Australia (MBA) continues to strongly signal that it will be
introducing measures (sometimes referred to as “revalidation”) to not only ensure continuing
education in your scope of practice, but also competence in the areas in which you practice.
The MBA has also recently indicated that it will be enlisting the help of Colleges for guidance
in appropriate activities for assuring individual specialist practitioner competence. In
anticipation of this, the College has pro-actively established frameworks for Internal Quality
Assurance in Anatomical Pathology (and Cytology), Haematology and Forensic Pathology,
with frameworks in the other disciplines currently under development. Under the IQA
Framework for AP and cytology, 10 additional hours of peer review activities have been
mandated by the Board to be documented under CPDP for the Calendar year 2016. This
mandatory additional 10 hours of peer review for CPDP will be introduced for Haematology,
Forensic Pathology and some other disciplines in 2017. To align with this initiative, the
CPDP and Information Manual will undergo some re-design over the coming months. It will
be essential for all Fellows to comply with the new structure and be able to be certified by
the College by 2017.
For many Fellows, compliance with RCPA CPDP will only require re-documenting activities
that they currently already record for other Colleges. This may be particularly so, for
example, for Fellows of The Royal College of Pathologists (UK). Others will need to consider
their scope of practice in laboratory medicine when planning and recording their CPDP and
IQA activities for the year. We encourage you to visit the College website for both CPDP
https://www.rcpa.edu.au/Fellows/CPD and IQA Framework
https://www.rcpa.edu.au/Library/Practising-Pathology/IQAFW for guidance. If you have any
queries regarding these changes, please contact Dr Bronwen Ross at
bronwenr@rcpa.edu.au