The European Federation of Organisations for Medical Physics Policy Statement No. 10.1: Recommended Guidelines on National Schemes for Continuing Professional Development of Medical Physicists

Abstract

A B S T R A C TContinuing Professional Development (CPD) is vital to the medical physics profession if it is to embrace the pace of change occurring in medical practice. As CPD is the planned acquisition of knowledge, experience and skills required for professional practice throughout one's working life it promotes excellence and protects the profession and public against incompetence. Furthermore, CPD is a recommended prerequisite of registration schemes (Caruana et al. 2014 [4]. It is to be noted that currently not all national registration schemes require CPD to maintain the registration status necessary to practise medical physics. Such schemes should consider adopting CPD as a prerequisite for renewing registration after a set period of time.This EFOMP Policy Statement, which is an amalgamation and an update of the EFOMP Policy Statements No. 8 and No. 10, presents guidelines for the establishment of national schemes for CPD and activities that should be considered for CPD.

Continuing professional development (CPD) in radiography: A collaborative European meta-ethnography literature review

“…The tension was between the need to evidence participation, versus the need to evidence learning. Neither system is infallible with literature supporting and highlighting the evident shortcomings of each 31,40,42,43,47,48 . CPD quantification systems have a failing in that they only measure CPD participation not output or even better knowledge translation 43 .…”

“…Nevertheless, there is considerable evidence in the literature that the vast majority of countries advocate a credit based model 31,42,43,48 . Proponents of this format of CPD argue its transferability and ease of benchmarking 43 .…”

“…In summary, the literature suggests a need of CPD activity variety 43 . CPD should include a mixture of course accredited CPD and other forms of CPD 48 however, all stakeholders must recognise flexibility and provision of a suitable 'space'.…”

“…Sanctions appear on a continuum from mild to extreme for example the health professional may not be able to re-register if they do not meet CPD requirements 38 . It must be noted however that not all regulatory bodies require CPD participation for re-registration 48 . There are recognised difficulties in administration aspects of a regulatory system 33,43,52 .…”

Education, training and registration of Medical Physics Experts across Europe

“…From the outset, education and training of medical physicists was an important area of interest, as demonstrated by the first EFOMP Policy Statement (PS), published in 1984 [1]. In the following years, other policy statements on the same subject followed [2,3,4,5,6]. Around the year 2000, the EFOMP Board introduced a system of approval of National Registration Schemes (NRSs).…”