The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7251 p777
31 May 2003

Society summary

Role for Society's branches in support for CPD?

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society's branches could have a role in the future in supporting their members in their continuing professional development, the Society's branch representatives' meeting heard on 15 May.

During a special session on continuing professional development, Dr Peter Wilson, the Society's CPD consultant, began by outlining the Society's CPD programme (PJ, 5 October 2002, p478) and the Council's recent decisions relating to mandatory CPD (PJ, 17 May, p699). He went on to point out that the branches' traditional role in continuing education had diminished with the setting up of the centres for pharmacy postgraduate education. He suggested that branches might now want to think about how they could contribute to their members' CPD.

Dr Wilson said that, as the roll-out of CPD progressed, branches could contribute by helping members to understand CPD fully, by supporting individuals in undertaking CPD and possibly by structuring their meetings so that they were within a CPD framework.

So far as understanding CPD was concerned, there was still scope to address some misconceptions that cropped up — misconceptions that "it is just continuing education", that "it is continuing education hours", that "it is only courses" or that "it is the end of my career, the end of my membership of the Society".

Branches might like to think about whether or not they could support individuals and possibly also CPD implementation in general. They could link experience with CPD in branch meetings back to the Society.

Branches could organise some parts of their programmes as CPD clinics, where members could help each other in groups. Rather than having a speaker, members could help each other with experiences on CPD, keeping records, finding out what other people were doing and using that as a measure against which to judge their own CPD experience.

Case studies

Branches could also introduce evenings involving CPD case studies, Dr Wilson suggested. He was reminded of the small articles that appeared regularly in the BMJ, headed "A case that changed my practice". These were usually readable anecdotes about things that happened to doctors — misdiagnoses, successful diagnoses, things patients had said — that struck a chord with the practitioner. All sorts of things appeared there.

People who were prepared to present case studies of their own CPD practice acted as exemplars for others, who could learn from them what to do and how to do it. It was an opportunity, in a safe environment, for discussion and feedback on how CPD practice could be improved. Hospital pharmacists would probably recognise that model from clinical pharmacy meetings, prevalent in the 1980s, where clinical pharmacists would come down from the wards and talk about patients they had seen and discuss what they had done right and what could be done better.

Branches could structure their meetings so that they encouraged people to reflect on why they were there and what they were looking to learn. Perhaps meetings could be followed by an analysis for individuals with three questions: What have you heard that stands out? What is the significance of what you have heard? What are you going to do with the things you heard and possibly learned? That could be done at the end of a normal branch meeting — an example might be an update on diabetes by a local diabetes consultant on updates in diabetes.