Welcome to the latest DPD newsletter.
This month we are looking at how we meet our CPD/CME requirements during the year and includes links to various CPD opportunities at the bottom of the page.
In addition to other yearly requirements (Audit, Resus etc) each year we have a minimum requirement of 5 hours of CME to complete. Over the entire triennium we have 60 hours of Additional CPD to complete. This mix between yearly and triennial requirements ensures that each year at least some CPD/CME is completed but it also accommodates people who steadily do some CPD all triennium as well as those who do a large amount in one go.
In many cases choosing your CPD/CME activities will be guided by your Professional Development Plans (PDPs). So, if you are looking to develop you POCUS skills, or leadership skills you will seek out courses, workshops and other CPD activities to achieve that goal, and these will likely then keep you current with your recertification requirements.
Another important driver to seeking our CPD/CME is the identification of areas of weakness. These can be the result of a clinical conundrum encountered during your practice, or an area of weakness identified during an audit of your personal practice, or through personal reflection on your practice. This is a very strong and effective way to undertake CPD and we should all be in the habit of reflecting on our practice both formally, through audits and reviews, and informally, through quiet personal reflection.
Finally, some CPD/CME might be achieved ad hoc, from opportunistic situations or from attending a conference with a broad spectrum of learning opportunities. This type of learning is important and while not guided by your own PDP it is able to help identify areas of interest or weakness and allows for unforeseen learning opportunities to arise.
So, thinking about this final situation, I wanted to share some resources that can help you with opportunistic CPD/CME.
JUCM Webinar
There was a JUCM webinar on October 16 at 0700 NZT. It looked at ways to improve antibiotic stewardship and whether viral testing in clinics helps in improving antibiotic use within urgent care. To watch the recording of this webinar, go to our webpage here.
If you are interested in other webinars from the JUCM, their archive is available here.
While these might not all be relevant to UC practice in NZ, and we must be mindful that some of the guidelines discussed will be from North America, there is still much to gain from listening to these archived recordings and will provide good reflective opportunities for your practice.
MPS Podcasts
The Medical Protection Podcasts are available via podcast apps, and you need not be a member to listen. They cover a lot of important topics relevant to your practice in New Zealand.
Research Review
Research Review publications are free to all NZ based Health Professionals. They collate latest papers from around the world and summarise them with relevance to NZ practice. There are reviews associated to all areas of medicine and the General Practice one is of relevance to us. It is easy to dismiss some of the topics as being too GP focused and therefore of no use to urgent care, but it is important that we keep a working knowledge of these topics and these reviews provide a perfect bite sized review for us to use. Many papers though are very relevant to urgent care so each of these publications is worth reviewing. You can register for free at this link.
JUCM Abstracts
On a similar theme to the research review, only with all the topics being relevant to urgent care, are the Abstracts of Urgent care collated by Dr Ivan Koay for the JUCM. Ivan is an FRNZCUC, currently based in London, and these reviews are always worth reading every month.
Goodfellow Sepsis
Sepsis is an important topic for us to keep in our minds in urgent care and the Goodfellow Unit have some good resources for us when it comes to CPD.
They have a training module we can access – to do this log into your Goodfellow Unit account and search for “Could this be Sepsis?”. This will take you to a module that takes about 30 minutes to complete. In addition, a webinar from Dr Paul Huggan on this topic is worth watching too.
Goodfellow Unit
Indeed, the Goodfellow unit have a number of resources that you can use as CPD. From educational courses to webinars and the Goodfellow Gems, checking out their latest will usually give you inspiration for something to learn.
College Cultural Safety and Health Equity page
This webpage collates a lot of important learning resources you can use for improving your cultural safety and health equity knowledge and understanding. These activities count for double points within our CPD programme so reviewing the many different resources on this page is encouraged.
RNZCUC Podcast
Our podcast provides weekly access to urgent care focused education, with all uploads being accompanied with links to papers or resources for further learning and reflection. Available through most podcast apps, or via our website, these are free to access. Just search for RNZCUC. While a lot of apps only access the last 100 uploads, all 354 uploads are available on the podcast’s homepage.