Continuing Professional Development

What is Continuing Professional Development?

Continuing Professional  Development (CPD) is a structured process of learning that had been accepted by many professional groups as a excellent means of maintaining the professional competence of the practitioners. A standard CPD Program may be divided into four stages, namely:

(1) Identification, (2) Planning, (3) Action, and (4) Evaluation.

A pharmacist needs to identify an area of weakness in his pharmacy practice that he desires to improve upon. It may be a knowledge gap in a specific therapy or treatment, inadequacy in ICT knowledge, or incompetence in pharmacy management.

Having identified an area to work on, he will determine what action plan to take. The plan may be to pursue a course by distance learning, or just to read and internalize a few books on a particular treatment. Whatever plan which is chosen should have the full potential of delivering the result.

Then he comes to the third phase: it’s Action time. This is the time to acquire the needed knowledge or skill through the carefully selected means. Whenever and whatever the action one takes, it is necessary to document it properly so that a peer evaluator will be able to understand and assess it. A written record is required.

After undertaken the whole plan (or course of study), one needs to evaluate oneself objectively to assess whether the CPD program has been completed satisfactorily. In some cases, written assessment may be the best means to gauze the performance.

How does the CPD System work?

The CPD Record for a successfully completed program shall be confirmed and awarded with the pre-determined number of CPD Points by the CPD Board.

Ideally all the CPD programmes should follow the above processes of learning. Nonetheless, CPD in Malaysia often refers to attending a seminar, a conference or a presentation. Presently one will receive one CPD point for attending an hour of accredited lecture, three CPD points for attending one day of CPD program, 8 CPD points for completing CSCSP seminar plus workshop, and etcetera.

At the moment, the CPD Providers are supposed to forward the record on all the seminar participants to the MPS’s CPD secretariat. There are some practical problems in the actual administration of the current system. Moreover, the public and private sectors are using different forms to record the CPD points. Not all the parties are fully familiar with the CPD system in this country.

Health Ministry requires all the public sector pharmacists to obtain not less than 30 CPD Points. Singapore Pharmaceutical Society requires all the practicing pharmacists to obtain 25 CPD Points, and it will be a compulsory requirement from year 2007. How many CPD Points do you think Malaysian pharmacists should obtain as a pre-requisite to getting the Annual Practising Certificate? Please send in your view and reasons.

CPD was implemented in Britain in 2003. All the “practicing” pharmacists must document their own CPD programmes in a CPD Logbook which will be submitted to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) for assessment of the practitioners’ competence. Since January 2005, no pharmacy graduates, regardless of the duration and experience you had in pharmacy practice, are allowed to present themselves as practicing pharmacists unless they undertake CPD program and are members of the RPSGB.

In New Zealand, their Pharmaceutical Society introduced “Practice Certificates based on Competence” since year 2000. They started to introduce a major change in their Pharmacy Degree Course syllabus and the Pre-Registration Training in 1997. To produce competent Pre-Registration pharmacists, the NZ Society requires them to complete satisfactorily four assignments, centralized 2x2 days training workshops, practical assessment, and individual competence appraisal report. All these events are to be documented and submitted to the Society. The Competence is focused on seven core areas, namely (1) practice pharmacy in a professional and ethical manner, (2) facilitate the rational use of medicines, (3) provide primary health care, (4) apply management and organizational skills, (5) apply information and research skills, (6) dispense medicines, and (7) prepare pharmaceutical products. (Pharm. J. 1999; 263:98-101, and Pharm. J. 2000; 265: 320). Australia is following the same pathway in the competence-based mechanisms for the pharmacists.

In North America, there is NAPLEX (North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination), developed by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, and is used by the boards of pharmacy as part of their assessment of “competence to practise pharmacy”.