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How to keep up to date with CPD

4 min read

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a vital part of being a dental nurse. It keeps your knowledge current, helps you work safely and professionally, and is a requirement of your registration with the General Dental Council (GDC).

Under the GDC’s Enhanced CPD scheme, introduced in 2018, dental nurses are expected to plan their learning, spread their CPD activities across their cycle and reflect on how each activity supports their development. With busy working weeks and life outside work, it’s easy to fall behind and find yourself rushing to catch up near the end of the CPD year.

To help you stay on track, we’ve put together our top 3 simple, stress free tips for keeping up to date with your CPD: planning your PDP early, focusing on the topics that matter most, and using reminders to prompt regular reflection.

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    How to keep up to date with CPD

    1. Plan your PDP early

    A dental nurse planning her CPDSpare some time at the beginning of your CPD year to organise your PDP (personal development plan). This will save you time and stress in the long term. In this time, you can reflect and think about the areas of knowledge and skills that you wish to progress in the following year. Your PDP can then be adjusted as you identify new needs and areas of development within your field of practice. Setting up timeframes for CPD completion will help spread the workload.

    You can take our FREE PDP CPD course to help with this and gain 1 hour verifiable CPD for completing it!

    2. Keep up to date with CPD by being aware of the important topics

    GDC has a list of recommended topics for most dental professionals to help your choice of CPD activities. These are not all compulsory, and you should think and do those ones that are most relevant to your own development and field of practice.

    These include:

    • Medical emergencies
    • Disinfection and decontamination
    • Radiography and radiation protection
    • Legal and ethical issues
    • Complaints handling
    • Oral cancer: early detection
    • Safeguarding children and young people
    • Safeguarding vulnerable adults

    3. Set reminders to prompt reflection and completion of CPD

    We all live very busy lives and do not always remember to reflect on our work performance.

    Using reminders can be a useful tool to focus your reflection. For example, every 2 weeks, set reminders for a time when you know that you will not be disrupted and use this opportunity to think of how your week has been, identifying strengths and weaknesses in your work. You can spend as little as 10 mins and make sure to have a notepad or notes app on your phone to put down ideas. Or you can add this straight to your PDP.

    To help your mind you can ask yourself:

    • Did anything happen at work where you felt that you could’ve helped more than you did?
    • Did you do a procedure and you felt in places a little bit out your depth?
    • Is there any new equipment at work that you’d like to gain more knowledge about?
    • Any memorable event at work recently?

    Now that we talked about reminders where do you find them and how do you use them?

    • You could use your calendar in your phone
    • You can use reminder app: some examples include Microsoft To Do app, Reminders app on iPhone or any app that you find easy to use
    • Or you can a write on the calendar on your fridge at home!

    The benefit with using a digital calendar or an app is that you can take it with you anywhere, you only need to set it up once, it will do the work for you indefinitely.

    Reminder tools are useful in conjunction with your PDP as they send you notifications of when to do a CPD activity based on the timeframes set up in your PDP. This way you can chip at your CPD activities little by little throughout the year.

    Conclusion

    CPD are such an important part of our compliance with GDC. Small changes like starting your PDP early and supporting your planned CPDs activities through reminders can help you stay on track.

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