Quick Guide to Continuous Professional Development in Nursing.

CPD is essential in nursing, but how can healthcare professionals better track their ongoing learning?

Continuous professional development is a requirement in nursing for those going through revalidation.

Organisations with a CPD cycle in place tend to see a 24% higher profit margin according to research.

For healthcare professionals, the goal of CPD is to improve patient care. But, while the statistic around profit isn’t applicable, it still highlights the impact CPD can have.

Improved ROI will come as a result of better processes, more knowledgeable staff and more collaboration. All of this will have a significant impact in a healthcare setting too.

Keep reading to learn:

• what continuous professional development is
• why CPD is important to the healthcare sector
• how to better manage revalidation and CPD

Let’s get started.

What is continuous professional development?

Continuous professional development is the process taken to document further learning taken to advance workplace skills and elevate career growth.

💡 Pro Tip

Read our complete guide to continuous professional development to see what activities count towards CPD and what the CPD cycle consists of.

Complete guide to CPD activities and CPD cycle

Generally, CPD is used as a portfolio to document any learning undertaken by employees.

In the nursing and healthcare space, it’s mandatory to log learning as part revalidation.

What CPD do you need to do in nursing?

Continuous professional development forms a key part of nurse revalidation.

Revalidation requires a number of items. But critically to this blog, nurses and midwives need to log 35 hours of CPD. 20 of those must be participatory learning.

✏️ Note

Participatory learning is any activity where you engage with another person. For example, attending a conference, taking part in a course or engaging in a forum.

When it comes to logging your hours, you need to ensure your records are accurate. You must include:

• The CPD learning with a short description and how it relates to your work
• The dates on which you completed the activity
• The number of hours spent – including how much participatory learning hours
• The part of your Code that is relevant to the learning undertaken
• Evidence of your CPD activity

How to better manage revalidation and CPD

Patient care is the priority for any nurse or midwife. Therefore, learning and development is often pushed to the bottom of the list.

As such, we’ve built tools to help make the process a little easier.

Revalidation

Revalidation takes a lot of time and effort to complete. Although it’s three years between each cycle, the number of hours required means it’s better for the learner to start sooner rather than later.

To support employees going through revalidation and to give organisations better oversight of the revalidation process, we created a revalidation portfolio that attaches to our Think Learning LMS.

Within the revalidation portfolio there are four main log types:

• CPD (participatory and non-participatory)
• Practice Hours
• Feedback
• Reflections

Users can view their target items and hours, their achieved items and hours, as well as be able to view and edit existing entries and add new entries. This gives nurses a living hub to add evidence of their CPD learning, wherever they are.  

They can also see a timeline (from their current revalidation date to their submission date, with a highlight on the current date).

SkillFund

Alongside this, we created a CPD hub tool called SkillFund.

This allows those managing the L&D for healthcare to better manage their training budgets and give learners one central resource to apply for courses.

SkillFund pulls through courses that are relevant for your learners and gives them sophisticated search and filter functions to find the right course for them.

With the attached budgeting tool, admins can see real-time reports on training budgets based on department and by individual. This gives better control over training resources and reduced admin time cross-referencing learners to budgets.

With this one central view, clinical staff can apply for the relevant courses they need In a few clicks.

Prioritise healthcare CPD for your learners with Think

With a Think LMS and the extra features we’ve created, you can build a fully bespoke learning and performance solution.

Trusted by Totara to deliver their basecode with our own flavour, we support over 30% of NHS staff in England with their learning and development through our LMS.

From budget tracking to revalidation, and performance management to mentoring, we create solutions to real problems our customers are having.

Learn more about how our team and tech can support you to achieve your goals and deliver better learning to more of your staff. Book a demo to see our platform and its tools in action.