POLICY AND SERVICE DELIVERY Article 990167 The challenge of introducing continuous professional development for paramedics.

Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is defined by the United Kingdom (UK) Health Professions Council (HPC) as: “…a range of learning activities through which professionals maintain and develop throughout their career to ensure that they retain their capacity to practise safely, effectively and legally within their evolving scope of practice.” Suggested key precepts of CPD are that the individual learner is responsible for their own learning and development; it is based upon and feeds back into practice; employers need to create optimal environments for CPD; and learning and development can be derived from an extremely wide and diverse range of both formal and informal activities. Paramedics and Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) must embrace the multitude of activities which contribute to a professional’s development. Any activity which follows an outcome based approach to learning, where the individual has reflected on practice and set about identifying an appropriate activity to develop, can be defined as CPD. This implies a move beyond the spoon-feeding culture of training to an educational approach of self