Continuing Professional Development

Below are resources, tools and guidance on Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

Register for the CPD diary, update your records, find details of College CPD study days or add your own.

Consultant Working

Find guidance on advice on Consultant Sign-Off, Clinical Excellence Awards and Medical Leadership.

Revalidation

Updates on the latest developments and advice on preparing for revalidation:

• Latest News
• Role of the College
• Revalidation Guidance
• Further Information
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Responsible Officers
• Revalidation e-Portfolio

Conferences and courses

Details of College and international conferences and courses of interest to emergency physicians

• Forthcoming conferences
• Previous conferences
• EMTA and FASSGEM conferences
• Courses and study days
• Courses of interest
• International meetings

E-learning

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s e-learning platform

Emergency Medicine Journal

Click here to visit the website of the official journal of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.

Submit to Emergency Medicine Journal and receive the following benefits:

• As the official journal of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, journal content is distributed to a targeted audience
• Fast Editorial Turnaround- 24 days from submission to first decision and 17 days from acceptance to online publication
• The journal publishes Best Evidence Topic Reports providing answers to common clinical questions
• High visibility: Blogs and Podcasts
• Educational Support: Image Quiz
• Article promotion: Via Twitter, Facebook, email alerts and press releases for selected articles
• Article metrics: Track downloads, citations and Altmetric statistics

With an International Editorial Board and Editorial Advisory Board, a diverse scope and an Impact Factor of 1.84*, Emergency Medicine Journal is THE ideal outlet to submit your best research! To log in to the manuscript submission page, please click here.

CPD Diary

The College’s CPD Diary is now hosted on RCEMLearning and is open to all Fellows and Members. You can login using your RCEMLearning details or the details you use to login in to the main College site. Trainees are welcome to use the diary but are advised that it does not replace ePortfolio.

The diary is now predicated on GMC domains for CPD activity and it contains easy to use data entry and export functions. Reflection is encouraged; please see the AoMRC Reflective Template for guidance.

Please note that data will not be migrated from the previous system to the new one. However, the old diary will remain open until 31 March 2020 and you will, therefore, be able to continue accessing your stored activity records, data etc.

If you have any questions or feedback about the new diary please contact rcemlearning@rcem.ac.uk.

CPD Events

• RCEM Study Days and Events

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has recently reviewed its policies and procedures regarding CPD guidance for Members and Fellows. Revised guidance from the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges emphasises that the focus of CPD should be on its quality and reflection of its impact on a doctor’s practice, rather than the amount of time spent on the activity and that the responsibility for identifying CPD requirements rests with the individual and should be based on their personal areas of practice and personal development plan agreed at their annual appraisal. Although one ‘CPD credit’ will normally equate to one hour of educational activity, the amount of educational activity obtained from a specific event may vary between individuals depending on an individual’s specific learning outcomes. For this reason, RCEM will no longer be awarding CPD points or credits to external CPD events, a practice that has already been adopted by several other Medical Royal Colleges.

At the current time, RCEM is unable to implement an alternative ‘accreditation’ process for the educational content of external events due to the substantial resources required to develop a robust quality assurance process. However, it is hoped that this may become possible in the future.

RCEM has published revised CPD Guidance for its Members and Fellows and it clarifies that although the College will no longer formally accredit external courses, it is important that a significant proportion of a doctor’s CPD should be undertaken outside their normal place of work and that they will still be required to undertake and record external CPD activity. Therefore, although it will now be the responsibility of the individual doctor to assess whether the content of the event is appropriate for their specific CPD requirements rather than RCEM passing a judgement on this, we would not expect the change in the CPD accreditation process to impact negatively on attendance at external CPD events that have relevance to the practice of Emergency Medicine.

1 April 2017 – (updated 16 November 2017, following publication of revised RCEM CPD Guidance)

Guidance on CPD

• The Royal College of Emergency Medicine Continuing Professional Development Guidance, published August 2017. The guidance contains advice on how to plan, conduct and document effective CPD activities.
• Continuing professional development: guidance for all doctors, published June 2012. Following widespread public consultation, this guidance was developed by the GMC in co-operation with doctors, medical royal colleges, employers, patients and the public.
• Standards and Criteria for CPD Activities: a framework for accreditation, updated July 2019, Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

Guidance on reflective practice can be found at the links below:

• The Reflective Practitioner: guidance for doctors and medical students (full guidance) (12 September 2018)
• The Reflection Practitioner: guidance for doctors and medical students (summary) (12 September 2018)
• Reflective Practice Toolkit (28 August 2018)