Transcript
29 September 2016
Pharmacy Board of Australia webinar: The CPD journey
Begin transcript:
Joe Brizzi:
Welcome to today’s webinar hosted by the Pharmacy Board of Australia, on the
continuing professional development journey. I'm the Board’s Executive Officer Joe
Brizzi. This is a public webinar, so you won’t be able to see each other’s questions.
We will keep a log of your chat questions and refer to you by your name if you ask a
question. If you wish to ask your question anonymously, please state that at the
start of your question. Please note that we are recording this session so we can put
it on line at a later date. A frequently asked questions document from today’s
webinar will also be published on the board’s website. We will now start today’s
Pharmacy Board of Australia webinar on the Continuing Professional Development
Journey.
Today's presenter is Miss Bhavini Patel, Chair of the Board’s Policy Codes and
Guidelines Committee, and a Board member. Bhavini will start by giving a rundown
on what today’s webinar will cover. Thank you Bhavini.
Bhavini Patel:
Thanks Joe, we had a little overlap there, so as Joe said my name’s Bhavini Patel,
I'm the Chair of the Board’s Policy Codes and Guidelines committee, and to start off
the presentation today, I'd just like to make an acknowledgement of the country
where I am today, in Darwin - which is the land of the Larrakia People - and also
acknowledge the traditional owners of all the places that people are all across
Australia listening to this presentation, and pay my respects to their elders past and
present.
So to start off with, I’ve just outlined what today’s webinar will cover, so we’ll start off
with having a discussion as to why it’s important to plan your CPD, I'll then go
through the CPD cycle and spend a bit of time discussing different ways that we can
learn. Then to finish off with I'll have a couple of slides on how we can use reflective
practice to accelerate our professional development opportunities, and then at the
end there’ll be a couple of slides that outline the Board’s CPD requirements and
resourcing tools that you might want to access after the webinar.
Okay so let’s get going. So what I'd like to do as Joe said is encourage you to
participate as we go through the webinar, so as questions pop up for you, type them
in. Also I'll be posing a few questions, so if you’re by yourself, maybe jot down some
answers or your thoughts, or if you’re with a group, you could maybe have a chat
about them. So I wanted to start off today’s presentation on a thought reflection on
what the following people have in common. So I've got a photo of the Buddha,
Marcus Aurelius, Galileo and the Chair of the Pharmacy Board our esteemed William
Kelly. Hopefully as I go through the presentation today, we might glean what these
people have in common.
So I'm a passionate supporter and participant of lifelong learning, and my definition
of lifelong learning is an ongoing and voluntary self motivated pursuit of knowledge
and skills. This may be in my work life, and I also am passionate about lifelong
learning in my personal life. Really this is the core philosophy I think we need to
cultivate as part of our professional development journey. So the Pharmacy Board
was established in 2010, and this allowed the board to bring together the variety of
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requirements that different states and territories had around CPD, prior to the
National Board coming into place.
So we’ve been taking a step-wise approach, in terms of first of all in 2010 making
sure that we had mandatory CPD requirements across the country that were the
same. Over the first three years, we gradually stepped up the mandatory
requirements. So we started off with 20 credit points, which then went up to 30 and
then 40 credit points. I'm hoping most of you are aware in December this year, sorry
December last year, in 2015 after extensive consultation, with the profession, the
Board introduced the concept of pharmacists to plan their CPD. I'm hoping that most
of you have taken some time to think about your CPD planning process, and as we
go through the presentation today, hopefully I'll be able to give you some tips.
So why has the Board been focused on continuing professional development? So
this slide really highlights my view of lifelong learning, and the different reasons why
as pharmacists we might want to undertake continuing professional development.
So I usually categorise this in to four different areas. So the first is we might need to
get new knowledge to help us do the work that we do better. We also need to keep
up with things that change over time. We might need to do a bit of myth busting, so
things that we held true, but actually they’re not when you go searching in to best
practice, or have a look at the literature. Then there’s a huge amount of knowledge
that is out there in our information age that we live in, that we just don’t know.
So what I'd like to do now is take each of those four domains that drive lifelong
learning and professional development, and just unpack that a little bit. So if we
think about new knowledge, I've got some images here on the slide of new
knowledge that seeped in to our society and our communities over the last 100
years. So bananas were really only discovered in the western world about 100 years
ago. About 70 years ago we learnt how to split the atom and made the atomic
bomb. It was only 25 years ago where the first mobile phones started coming into
use. So there’s new knowledge coming in to our communities and our societies and
our profession every time. I just want you to maybe reflect on some of the new
knowledge that you might have come across in your professional development
journey.
So a Buddhist saying that I found was “having a mind that’s open to everything and
attached to nothing” is a really good quote to really get us keeping our mind open for
any new knowledge that might be just around the corner. I've just got a few
examples here. So we know in our base understanding of how Statins work in
reducing cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, our knowledge around these drugs
have been growing continuously since they've been marketed. So now there’s
information around the anti-inflammatory and antithrombotic effects and even trials
now starting for their use in cancer prevention.
Who would have thought that we would have had vaccines to prevent cancer? So
that’s a new therapeutic intervention that’s come through for the HPV virus. Then an
Australian first – looking for an infective cause of gastric ulcers – so the discovery of
helicobacter totally revolutionised the treatment for people with gastric ulcer disease
and improved the quality of life and mortality outcomes for a large number of people.
So there’s always new knowledge coming in to our world and we need to have a
mind that’s open to everything and not too attached to old ways of thinking.
The second motivator for lifelong learning is this idea that things change over time,
and you can see in this graphic, when computers - computing first started, they were
very heavy and even before that, took up a whole couple of rooms. Today we’re in
the mobile phone age, and maybe in the future we may have integrated technology
within our bodies. Then the bottom slide’s really looking at evolution and how
giraffes have changed over time. Marcus Aurelius said, “observe always that
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everything is as a result of change” and thinking about taking time to reflect about
what things have changed within your practice of pharmacy. Whether you just
qualified last year or you’ve been a pharmacist like me for 20 years.
Things are always changing and again, I've got some examples here. We’ve got old
medicines with new uses, so things like thalidomide, came on to the market, it was
withdrawn from the market because of the side effects and now it’s come back in to
use to treat Hansen’s disease or leprosy. There's lots of examples about old
medicines with new uses, another one might be [Verapamil] which is starting to get
some usage in the use of headaches and migraines. Things that changed in my
time as a pharmacist, when HIV first became prevalent. We just had one drug,
which was Zidovudine and now we use multiple combinations to get highly active
antiretroviral treatment, which again has really improved mortality and quality of life
for people living with HIV.
Then the last example is the journey around smoking cessation and how it's gone
from a socially acceptable pastime, to our understanding of the harmful effects of
smoking and the role that the pharmacists can play in terms of nicotine replacement
therapy and providing quick advice as an intervention, when people come in to talk
to you as a pharmacist. The next quote I want to share with you is Galileo and this is
really around the things that we hold true but are not. Galileo said “all truths are
easy to understand, once they’re discovered, but the point is to discover them in the
first place”. Obviously his discovery of the earth going around the sun, instead of the
other way around, shook the foundations of a lot of western society.
So again just reflecting on the things that we hold true, and maybe the things that we
might have learnt as an undergraduate student, or early in our pharmacy careers.
Again over time, those truths need to be re-examined. Some examples that I found
during my practice, are ones that I have incorporated, are beta blockers when I was
at university. It was a total contraindication to prescribe a beta blocker in someone
with heart failure, and now we routinely use them as part of first and [second/central]
line therapy.
This old chestnut that only pharmacists can dispense medicine safety and certainly
in the UK now, trained pharmacy technicians are taking care of the entire dispensing
process with the pharmacist doing the clinical check at the beginning, for the
appropriateness of therapy. Then handing that prescription over to the technician,
who also do the final check for accuracy and completeness of the medicines that are
supplied to the patient. Another example is dosing Colchicine to toxicity and we
know now that’s not a very good treatment for gout, and we’ve developed other ways
of using Colchicine and more effective treatments.
Then the last one I had under this was leaders have to be the smartest person in the
room, and this really resonates with me in the roles that I've been doing over the last
few years, and how it’s really important to have a team around you that have
complementary skills, and to ask for help. Because often there are a lot more
cleverer people in your team than you are around certain subjects. Then the last
one is the available knowledge that we just don’t know. This is the classic, the
known known’s and the unknown unknowns, and I like this graphic because it really
articulates that the amount of knowledge that we had and we hold, and we use on a
day to day basis, is only a fraction of the things you realise you don't know.
So CPD and lifelong learning really allows us to access all of that information that’s
out there, and gives us an opportunity to incorporate that in to our professional
practice. So Bill Kelly as I said is our Chair and he – a quote from him from one of
our Policy Codes and Guidelines committee discussions around CPD – is that the
available knowledge that we just don't know, is often the most common stimulus for
professional development. So you might have come across something in your day
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to day practice, and say oh, I actually don’t know how to deal with this scenario, or I
don’t know the answer to a question that a patient may have posed, or a staff
member. Often that’s the stimulus for you then to go and find out some more
information and look at doing some professional development.
So if we have a look at the Board’s suggestion around professional development,
we’ve developed this circular diagram about planning, doing, recording, reflecting
and then incorporating into practice. What I'd like to do now is to go through each of
those steps, in terms of making sure that the professional development activity that
you're doing is giving you the maximum benefit. So as I said earlier, planning is
something that's always been implicit in undertaking CPD, but from December last
year, the Board has really provided extra guidance around encouraging everyone to
proactively plan your professional development activities for the CPD year.
So this graphic really looks at what steps you should take when you’re planning your
CPD. So the first step really is to define your scope of practice. To sit down and
think about, well what is it that I do – on a day to day basis, on a week by week basis
or on an infrequent basis – as part of my role as a pharmacist. Once you’ve defined
your scope of practice, you can then relate them to the relevant competency
standards that the profession has. That then allows you to have a look at which
areas you might have opportunities to improve in your current practice. So defining
your scope, identifying the relevant competency standards and then taking some
time to reflect.
Reflect on any of the competency standards where you might feel you need
improving on, or reflecting on some of the areas as I discussed before, where you've
come across things in your day to day practice in the past, that you feel you need to
increase your knowledge and your skills in. Then lastly trying to identify activities
that have significant intellectual practical content. My next slide will talk a little bit
about how we do CPD, and often people can get into a bit of a routine, like with
everything. But CPD is reading journal articles and then maybe doing the multiple
choice questions at the end.
I'd really like to encourage you to think about the much more effective and variety of
ways in which we can learn; particularly focusing on those things that require active
participation and that are grounded in adult leaning principles. So here I've got some
examples of different ways in which you might want to engage in your CPD, and
obviously self study, looking in journals, reviewing the literature, finding the right
journal articles, is obviously one way of doing this. But there’s a whole variety of
other ways, which may allow you to take a more active role in terms of developing up
additional knowledge and skill sets.
So mentoring and having consultations with senior pharmacists or pharmacists that
may have expertise in that area that you’ve identified that you want additional
knowledge or skills in. You could pair up with a peer and do some reflective
supervision, where you might ask your manager to come and have a look at your
practice in a particular area, and then sit down and have a conversation about your
peer or your supervisor’s thoughts and reflections on how you went about that
particular piece of work.
There’s lots of communities of practice that are now available. I'm a member of the
SHPA, and we have communities of specialty practice, in a variety of different areas
with chat rooms and opportunities for people to learn together, either online or
coming together, in doing seminars and workshops. Then the last one and another
common one that people access is attending workshops and conferences. Really
the idea about planning your CPD is to then, when you're looking at conferences or
workshop learning outcomes or topics, you pick those ones that align with the
learning goals that you’ve set yourself for this current CPD year.
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So moving on to recording CPD, there is a requirement under the Board CPD
standard for pharmacists to keep records. I know recording things is often the last
thing on the list of a busy – when you’ve had a busy day. But recording is really
important, it’s part of the reflection process, which I'll talk to you in a minute. But this
slide really looks at some of the key elements that the board has outlined in terms of
the things that you might want to record as part of showing evidence that you’ve
undertaken appropriate CPD activity. So there is no requirement for you to submit
your CPD plans, but you are required to record your activities, so if you happen to be
the lucky person who gets selected for a CPD audit, you’ve got good documentation
that you can provide to show that you’ve planned your CPD and that you’ve also
undertaken and met the 40 credit point requirement under the registration standard.
So these headings are there for guidance, and I know different people keep records
in different ways, and certainly after you’ve completed your CPD activity, taking time
to do some reflection and thinking about how you might incorporate the knowledge
and the skills that you might have been exposed to as part of your CPD activity,
really accelerates your ability to provide better care for your patients, or your
customers, be a better team leader or whatever activity that you’re focusing on. So
reflection is often a word that is not well understood, and so I've just developed a
slide, a reflective practice slide 101, which is what I call it. Really this is taken from
the work of Terry Borton who was writing in the 1970s. So this stuff works and
hasn’t changed much.
After you've done a CPD activity, it’s really important that you ask yourself these
three questions. What did I do? What does that mean for my practice? What do I
need to do next? By going through this reflection cycle, it really allows you to
transform the information that you might have been exposed to as part of your CPD
activity into knowledge that you can then apply in your workplace. Whether that’s in
your day to day practice as a pharmacist, or in other parts of your life really.
Because so often the things that we learn, as part of our professional CPD have
relevance in your life and vice versa.
The reflection cycle also allows you to apply general understandings that you might
have gleaned from the CPD activities into new situations into the future. It allows
you, when you ask the what next question, it really allows you to think about, well,
how do I incorporate what I have learnt into my practice when I go back to work?
Whether it’s you're going to do that in the next day or the next week or the next
month. Really the idea about asking well what next, now that I've done my CPD
activity, is really the basis for improving your practice and improving the services that
you’re providing. Sometimes when you do a CPD activity, you actually don't need to
change anything. Because it may actually reinforce that the approach that you are
taking or validate the skills that you have, as not needing change. But more often
than not, it does allow you to tweak or make major changes to the way you might go
about doing your practice as a pharmacist.
So they're my, I suppose, they’re my reflections on lifelong learning, so before we
open up the floor for discussion, I've just got one more final slide which is a quote
from Mahatma Gandhi, and he said “live as if you were to die tomorrow, but learn as
if you were to live forever”. I'd really like to encourage all of you to think of CPD as
not another chore that you have to fit in to your busy day as a working pharmacist,
but as another step in your lifelong journey, your lifelong learning journey. What I'll
do is, as we open up the floor for questions, I'll just bring up the last couple of slides,
which really look at some of the resources that are available for pharmacists who are
wanting to maybe get a bit more serious about their planning and their CPD activity.
So the Pharmacy Board website has a section under the Codes and Guidelines part
of the website, where there’s information on how to develop a CPD plan, including
the example that I've given. There’s lots of frequently asked questions around the
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different groups and types of CPD activity; what records you need to keep. What
you need to do if you have a period of time away from practice. The professional
associations have also been - have got a wide variety of resources for members. If
you go onto their websites, then there’s a whole host of information and tools that
you can use to help do your CPD planning. Also access information and workshops
and CPD activities.
The last thing I just want to remind people, is that the new obligations come in to need to be met by - the next renewal period, which is when you go to renew your
registration, which is the 30th November in 2016. Okay so Joe I might hand over to
you now, for opening up the discussion for questions, if you're ready.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini, so if anybody out there has some questions that they'd like to ask,
could you please type those in to the textbox and send them to us, and we’d be glad
to read them out and answer them for you. We’ll just give you a few seconds to do
that, so just hold on and we’ll give you some questions and answers. So we have a
question from [Gillian] thanks Gillian. Her question is “I see my pharmacy life as
beyond clinical practice, and enjoy exploring different issues. CPD expectations
seem somewhat [thorough]. Which have been your most lateral CPD experiences?”
Bhavini Patel:
That’s a great question. So there’s a lot of pharmacists who have a role that’s much
broader than just their direct patient or clinical interaction, and often people find it
difficult to work out what exactly – the type of CPD they need to do. I love being out
in nature, which is one of the reasons why I live in Darwin in the Territory, and often I
do a lot of bushwalking. Often when I'm finding myself in a bit of a pickle while I'm
walking, whether I'm lost or have a river to – just recently I went to Iceland on a walk,
and there was an icy cold river, where we had to take our shoes off and wade.
Often those kind of experiences when I come back from a walk and I reflect on them,
sort of looking at the challenges that I've faced over that time, I often find a learning
that I can then apply into my practice as a pharmacist. Often it’s to do with problem
solving, finding a different way to resolve a situation, whether that’s to do with – I've
got a large team – whether that’s to do with managing a difficult situation with a staff
member or advocating for extra resources for my pharmacy service.
So I tend not to compare my - put my life and my professional learning into
compartments, and often if you take time to do reflection, you can find learnings from
things like bushwalking, which on the surface don’t have anything to do with the
practice of pharmacy, but you can get some good learnings that help you in your day
to day practice.
Joe Brizzi:
Hi Alfred, thanks for your question. Alfred asks “Does the November deadline apply
to interns as well?” which is a great question because obviously interns can start at
any time of the year. Yeah I was just going to say, the 12-month period of your
internship is the timeframe that you should be working by in order to complete your
annual CPD requirements. It's when you get on to – when you have general
registration and you're on the register – at that point, you’ll then have to meet the
annual deadline that’s tied in to the renewal of registration process.
So the next question from Phillip, “Does continued education need to be solely
pharmacy medication related? For example if you're running a pharmacy business,
can any business related education be counted as CPD?”
Bhavini Patel:
Yeah that's another common question that pharmacists often have a discussion
about. So if you recall, when you're planning your CPD, the first place really to start
is to think about your scope of practice. So as a pharmacy business owner, your
scope of practice includes not just the clinical activity that you might do while you're
dispensing or providing services directly to your customers, but all of the
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management, financial, and human resource skills and knowledge that you need to
run a successful pharmacy business.
So as long as you are looking at your scope of practice, identifying gaps where you
feel doing some professional development activity would enable you to deliver or
practice in that part of your role, more effectively. If you’ve identified that you need
some additional knowledge or skills around say business development or financial
planning, then going to a - undertaking an activity that focuses on those skill sets and
knowledge sets would be - would comply and you’d be able to add up credits for the
time that you spent doing those activities.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. We have a question from Adrian. “Is there any requirement for a
percentage of clinical or managerial credits each year?”
Bhavini Patel:
So the Board guidelines and the standard don’t stipulate particular percentages for
any type of practice. Really it would be very difficult, given the broad range of
activities that pharmacists do, and a quite broad range of the definition of practice. It
really is up to you to plan where your gaps are and then, according to your scope of
practice, and then decide on what activities you need to do to help you practice as a
better pharmacist.
Now obviously if you – when I was a clinical pharmacist providing services to renal
patients – the predominant, most of my CPD would have been around the clinical
workload, around use of medicines in that particular patient population. But I was
also working within a cross cultural setting where a lot of my patients were
Aboriginal, or were from South East Asia, given where Darling is on the map. So I
would regularly do CPD around cross cultural communication, and then that would
compliment my clinical skill set. So when I was engaging with patients or with family
members, I was able to tailor my communication with using plain English, being
careful of my metaphors et cetera.
So the great thing about the Board requirements is it’s really up to you to decide,
based on your scope of practice, what you need to do in any given CPD year.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks, we have a question from [Chi]. Chi says “I finished all my credits two
months ago without a plan, and I plan to have a CPD plan for next year. Do I need
to do a retrospective plan in order to be able to reregister this year?”
Bhavini Patel:
Okay, so I suppose the word plan can mean a variety of things, and the key thing
that the board is interested in is – is the pharmacist to do planning? So if you’ve
reflected on your scope of practice and have identified – and have done CPD
activities – that meet any identified gaps that you've found; or help you deal with
situations that you’ve come across where you felt you’ve needed some extra
support; then writing down your reflections around that. Really if you are audited,
you’ll be able to provide evidence with the sort of planning that you may have done.
So you may not have developed a formal plan and written it down, but most people
do informal planning around their CPD. So it's really thinking about how you’ve
recorded it, and which parts of your practice, the various CPD activities that you’ve
undertaken, fit into, as you look at your scope of practice. So I hope that was clear.
Joe have you got any other comments you wanted to make about the planning for
this year?
Joe Brizzi:
No, but I have another question which sort of flows on from this particular issue. We
have a question “How do we plan our CPD not knowing what topics, activities,
articles et cetera will be available in advance?”
Bhavini Patel:
Okay. So again if we think about the planning process, what we’re trying to do is
encourage people to go from being reactive, so you see something, you go oh that
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might be interesting and then go off and do the activity. Change that to being
proactive and saying, well in my scope of practice in my day to day work, I feel I
need improvements in areas A, B and C, and then potentially go out and seek
opportunities to fill those knowledge or practice gaps that you’ve identified. Often the
amount of CPD activity that’s available to us now, whether it’s in cell study around
journals or going to workshops, has expanded exponentially.
But I'd also encourage you as I did in my presentation, to think about all the different
other ways that you might be able to learn and do professional development
activities. So if you proactively identified a particular area, you may decide that
having a peer come and do some reflective supervision with you might actually be a
good way of either improving your knowledge or improving your skill set around that
area.
Joe Brizzi:
Thank you to Peter for the next question. “Am I correct in assuming that I am the
sole judge of what constitutes CPD within my scope of practice? Or it this subject to
assessment and judgment of the auditor?”
Bhavini Patel:
Interesting question. My thoughts on your question is I suppose we can look at it two
ways. So the audit team, the audit process really is looking at you providing
evidence around the CPD activity that you’ve undertaken. As long as you can show
that you have reflected on your scope of practice and have identified professional
development activities that allow you to meet any gaps. And the activity that you’ve
done is of, what did I say, of significant intellectual or practical content, and then
reflection on how you’re going to incorporate that into your future practice. Yes, I
suppose it is up to you to be the judge of what the right activity is for you.
The audit process really is there to make sure that – the audit process allows you to
provide evidence of the activities that you’ve done and then reflections on how that
might have changed your practice.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini, we have a question from Allan. “The Board refers to the
competency standards” Alan says “I got the impression that the plan is derived from
gaps in these areas. However, business gaps do not necessarily come from here or
are not necessarily covered in the standards. So is it compulsory for the plan to be
derived from these competency standards alone?”
Bhavini Patel:
The simple answer to that question is no. The competency standards for the
profession, are the - I suppose the agreed standards for the different domains that
constitutes pharmacy practice. But if you’ve had a look at the scope, your scope of
practice, and you've identified other activities that you think will help you run your
business, be a better HR manager et cetera, then as long as you can link that back
to your scope of practice, you don’t need to be limited necessarily by what’s
contained within the standards. But they're a good place to start.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. I was just going to add one more point, in relation to that. If we look
at the competency standards, there are some evidence guides there. But ultimately
each pharmacist needs to be satisfied that they are aware of the actual evidence that
they need for their practice. So it's not to say that we can’t have some different
statements in relation to some of those competencies and elements. Not
everybody’s plans et cetera are going to – or scopes of practice – are going to look
exactly the same, the way they’re articulated. Our next question is from Cameron.
“What is involved in the Board’s CPD audit process?”
Bhavini Patel:
Joe, I might see if - I might invite you to answer that question.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. The audit process is run by a team of auditors here at AHPRA.
Basically what will happen if you are selected for audit, and I should say that
participants are randomly selected. There will be clear guidance provided as to what
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we're auditing and therefore the information that you need to provide to demonstrate
that you’ve actually complied with the standards. We can audit any of our
registration standards, and obviously the amount of evidence will depend on the
standard, and so obviously we're talking about CPD today. We’ll be asking you to
provide evidence that you’ve planned your CPD according to your scope of practice.
We’ve talked about a number of those issues this evening. Obviously clear evidence
that you’ve obtained at least 40 CPD credits, noting I should say, that in order - we
often see many, many more than the minimum annual requirement. Which probably
brings up the issue about what is my scope of practice and what are my professional
learning needs? With a broad scope of practice, that could mean that there’s lots of
things on a plan that need to be addressed within a certain period of time. So it isn’t
just a case of providing the simple list of activities. We will be asking for some
information around your scope of practice, and some evidence to show that you’ve
actually addressed a range of issues according to your scope.
Bhavini Patel:
Yeah and just - sorry Joe - I've just got an additional comment, or maybe just to
stress, that the Board audits not just the CPD standard, but all the registration
standards. So we've got a range of standards, such as the need for professional
indemnity insurance, criminal history checks et cetera. So the CPD standard’s just
one of many and if you are the lucky one, as I said before, chosen for an audit, then
the requirements are well spelt out in the information pack that you will receive from
AHPRA.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini, I also have a comment from Adrian. Adrian says “May I say most
people have a plan, they just don’t document it. So I guess we must just document
it”.
Bhavini Patel:
That’s correct, and I think my response to the question earlier, is most people have a
plan and what the Board’s asking, through the audit process, is to show the Board
the evidence of that plan. Which obviously means that it needs to be documented in
some way, and the little table headings that I had up on the slide are some guidance
pointers for the things that you might want to document as you go through your CPD
planning, and then recording the activities that you've done.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. We have a question from [Edmund]. Edmund says “The problem is
that most recognised CPD is drug based. How do we get things like cross cultural
studies incorporated?”
Bhavini Patel:
So I suppose the challenge to me – the challenge is for us to broaden our horizons
when we’re thinking about what constitutes CPD and where we might access it. So
certainly where I practice we have a large Aboriginal population and so access to
cross cultural activities is reasonably easy. You might be practicing in an area where
you’ve got different cultural groups, and you might want to reach out to the various
cultural societies that we have in Australia. So there might be a Vietnamese society,
or a Chinese society, that often have language courses or opportunity for you to go
and talk to people about appropriate ways to communicate or cultural norms within
their communities.
So really the challenge is maybe to look beyond the pharmacy and the medical
press, look beyond the pharmacy and the medical websites, and really look at those
alternative ways that I described in the presentation for doing CPD. Then also look
at whether it’s a business, conference, or whether it’s contacting your local cross
cultural community or whatever other lateral activities that you might think of, to fill
the gap that you’ve identified.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. We have a question from Patricia, who asked “Is the plan that is
needed by the 30 November 2016 supposed to reflect the 2016/17 year?” I suppose
Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency
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a quick answer to that is that when you renew on the 30 November 2016, or by then,
you’ll be asked to make a declaration about the CPD that you undertook during this
registration period. So it is not about planning for next time, we will ask whether
you’ve complied with the standard, by planning your CPD according to your scope of
practice, and whether you’ve met the minimum annual requirements of at least 40
CPD credits. I can go on to…
Bhavini Patel:
Yeah, sorry I might just interrupt and just make one comment. I suppose I didn't
really touch on it in my presentation, but CPD planning is a dynamic process, and
the Board has elected to have the CPD go from September – starts and ends in
September. But really your CPD planning process and the recording that you do
around that, you should see it as a living document. So it might be that you've sat
down today and thought about, well what’s my scope of practice, what am I going to
do for the next 12 months for CPD? Then next month, I might come across
something in my practice where I go, actually I don’t know much about that, or I don’t
really think I handled that situation very well on reflection and maybe I need to go
and find some more information or learn how to do X, Y and Z skill better.
You then incorporate that into your CPD planning for the rest of the CPD year. So
I'd encourage people again not to think of this as a process that you just do once.
We should be continually reflecting on what’s happened during our work day and see
the CPD planning process, and the plan itself, as a living document that you can
amend and change, as you identify different things that need improving.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. Our next question is from Phillip who asks “Does the Board have
any plans or power to require employers to grant employees paid leave to acquire
their CPD credits, or is this 40 plus hours to be taken from personal leave?” This is a
rather interesting question to ask, and of course we need to be clear that the Board’s
powers do not extend to industrial relations requirements. That’s not the Board’s
role. Obviously the Board’s role is to ensure public safety and it has the power to
develop registration standards and guidelines et cetera, which set out some
minimum requirements. In deciding what those minimum requirements should be, of
course, we do consult widely on those proposals.
We are very mindful of the impact and obviously we need to find a balance of setting
what is clearly safe and appropriate for practice, and to protect the public. But
obviously the requirements we set cannot be onerous or impossible to achieve. So
in summary, I'm afraid that the Board can’t require employers to provide leave or
payment for those things. But I imagine that there are a range of circumstances out
there that pharmacists may have to pay their own, sometimes employers pay. But
that’s something that pharmacists need to negotiate with their employers.
Bhavini Patel:
Yeah and I'd like to echo Joe’s comments there. One of the things I suppose to think
about, is often your employer is a pharmacist who also has similar requirements for
their registration. Being able to articulate the benefits of service improvement or
your performance within the workplace, if you attend particular CPD activities, might
be a good way of I suppose starting the conversation with your boss. To negotiate
either paid time to attend a training activity or for them to give you reimbursement for
some of the costs, that you might incur while you’re doing the CPD.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. So Melissa has put forward a question. “So we don’t have to use
any specific template to document a plan, is that right?”
Bhavini Patel:
Yeah, so the Board doesn't mandate - hasn’t mandated a particular template. What
we have done is provided pharmacists with some guidance around the elements of
recording that would be required for you to meet - to provide evidence if you are
audited. So again the Board’s tried to be - has tried not to be too prescriptive, but
has provided guidance in terms of the type of things that pharmacists should be
Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency
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recording. So they can maintain evidence that they've met the CPD requirements. I
suppose just another point around the records is that we do recommend that you
need to keep records of CPD undertaken during the previous three years. So don’t
shred your CPD records from the last year – you need to keep records for three
years.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. I suppose one of the other things to mention here is the tools that
have been made available by professional pharmacy organisations, and a lot of
those tools have been well received by pharmacists. So if anyone's interested in
looking at something other than what the Board’s put up on their website, we highly
recommend that you engage with some of those professional organisations.
Bhavini I'm mindful that we’re almost out of time. So I think I'll read you this last
question, which is from Catherine who asks “Does the CPD plan need to be in place
for the whole year, starting 1 October, or is it a continual planning process that may
change and progress as the CPD year goes on?”
Bhavini Patel:
Yeah, so if you recall my response to the previous - to one of the previous questions.
I see the CPD planning process as being an ongoing process. But you do need to
make sure that the way you document any changes in your planning process allows
there to be a continuity of things that you’ve added, things that you’ve completed and
then reflections on how the activities that you've done have impacted on your
practice. People often – I think we had another caller who said that they'd reached
their 40 credits already – and you might reach your 40 credits halfway through the
CPD year. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn't continue to be identifying
learning new things.
As Joe said, often large - actually large numbers of pharmacists who are audited
often have, when they provide their evidence, they continue to do CPD well past the
40 credit number. Their CPD activities spread out throughout the whole year, as
opposed to doing a whole bunch of stuff in a concentrated time period. That really
again will allow you to maximise the practice change and your development as a
pharmacist if you continue to spread out your CPD, and be flexible to change what
you need to be focusing on, based on what experiences you’re having over the year.
Joe Brizzi:
Thanks Bhavini. As I said we’re out of time for questions, but I have one quick
comment from Edmund who says “I found this more useful than I originally thought”.
So Edmund thank you, because I'm really pleased to hear that.
Bhavini Patel:
Yes I am too.
Joe Brizzi:
So thank you everyone for your participation today and thank you Bhavini for talking
to us about the Board CPD requirements. Thank you.
Bhavini Patel:
Great, thank you everybody, really appreciate the questions that we’ve had today
and good luck with your lifelong learning journey and making the most of your CPD
activities.
End transcript.
Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency
G.P.O. Box 9958
| Melbourne VIC 3001 | www.ahpra.gov.au
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