CPD Through the Career Stages

For every physician, CPD begins in much the same way. As a new Fellow, it’s another responsibility that comes with maintaining registration. There are activities to complete, hours to record and requirements to meet. But as careers progress, that perspective often changes.

What starts as a framework for maintaining registration becomes something far more valuable, helping physicians reflect on their practice, adapt to changing roles and continually improve patient care.

Professor Clair Sullivan, Dr Anthony Deacon, Dr Hash Abdeen, Dr Fahid Hashem and Dr Gauri Gogna are at different stages of fellowship, yet their experiences reveal a common journey. While the requirements of CPD remain consistent, the way physicians engage with them evolves alongside their careers. Early on, it’s about building confidence and identifying learning needs. Later, it becomes a tool for navigating new responsibilities, supporting others and measuring the impact of clinical practice.

Early career: Building strong foundations

Becoming a Fellow marks a significant shift in responsibility. While training provides a structured framework for learning, consultant practice requires physicians to take greater ownership of their professional development.

Dr Hash Abdeen acknowledges that the transition to self-managing CPD for new Fellows can be challenging at first.

“I think it is challenging because when you’re a trainee, you’re not expected to do CPD and so it’s a kind of a new concept when you first Fellow. You realise this is now a responsibility that you have in terms of maintaining registration with the medical board and better understanding the reasons why we do CPD.”

Dr Abdeen goes on to say that as a new Fellow, the RACP’s MyCPD program provides a great deal of direction on undertaking and completing your annual CPD.

“There’s a lot of guidance that I’ve seen on the website, particularly around the categories I think most of us know about: education and training, which include attending conferences and things that are quite easy for most people to do and tick off. Where RACP myCPD comes in really handy is providing the guidance around reviewing outcomes and performance, which are the other CPD two and three categories and are a little bit more challenging for people. And getting your head around that I think is key.”

He also recommends approaching colleagues around how they undertake their CPD for those first starting out on their CPD journey.

“As new fellows, you can speak to other Fellows who are more senior about how they achieve their professional development. They’ve been doing CPD for a while, even though it was in a different format. But I think it’s nice to be able to talk to colleagues around how they do their CPD to support best practice.”

For Dr Anthony Deacon, CPD provides an opportunity to step back, identify areas for growth and intentionally plan the year ahead.

Each year, he begins by completing his professional development plan, using it to identify where he wants to develop over the next 12 months.

“I upload my professional development plan and do it in February every year. And that’s because that was the month of the year that I started as a consultant. And, we have to do it roughly every 12 months. So, it’s continued in that fashion.

“I would love to say that it’s proactive. And we’re doing it at the start of the year for a reason, but it’s really not much more than when I started doing it. But it does work well because it’s at the start of the year, and there has been a couple of things over the last three years that have been helpful to identify in advance to plan the time to address them.”

Mid-career: Adapting and growing

As physicians become more established, their careers often broaden beyond clinical practice. New leadership responsibilities, teaching opportunities and committee work create different learning needs, requiring CPD to evolve alongside them.

For Dr Fahid Hashem, one of the biggest changes has been rethinking mentorship. The senior clinicians who helped shape his early career are beginning to retire, prompting him to reflect on where guidance comes from and how professional growth continues throughout a career.

“That’s a really good question because it’s something I’ve been reflecting on lately as a mid-career fellow. Yes, my mentors are going into retirement and I’m having to rethink mentorship. Compared to my previous model is I had two mentors who would help me guide my career structure. I’d get all the information I felt I needed from the two mentors.

“But as in mid-career, I feel I’ve had a lot more diversification of what I’m doing and the ways I’m growing and also with my mentors going into retirement. It’s still an open question. Who would be a good mentor saying that? I’m also happy and I’m open to look to other fellows who are not quite a senior because I, I think I can receive mentorship from any degree of seniority because I guess, each domain would have their experience from which I can learn from.”

That openness to learning from a wider range of colleagues has also influenced the way Dr Hashem thinks about CPD. As a member of the RACP CPD Committee, he sees professional development as something that extends beyond maintaining competence. Instead, he believes it plays an important role in strengthening the profession, supporting personal wellbeing and reinforcing the trust patients place in physicians.

“CPD is more about your own personal wellbeing, not only competency... So, when we say that we have fellows at the college or with specialist physicians and everyone is doing the CPD with this mindset that they want to be the best version of themselves, not only as clinicians but as citizens, which is linked to the annual conversation.

“And you know, how to be a better version of yourself. Eventually, I see it as an emerging brand of physicians who are highly respected and also, trusted and in the contemporary paradigm where we have a lot of skepticism around health care and a lot of information and misinformation around health care, I think it’s very important to maintain this brand of trust.”

For Dr Gauri Gogna, her approach to CPD at this point in her career is more about balance, acknowledging CPD is a compulsory part of being a medical professional and ensuring that you get the most out of the practice for your individual needs.

“CPD is something we have to do, it’s obligatory. So instead of moaning and complaining about it, try and find a way to make it meaningful and interesting for you, however that might be. Whether it’s focusing on your outcomes, or that you’ve got a real passion for teaching or whether you love learning new things and developing new skills - you’ve got to find a way to meet these requirements.”

Late-career: Looking back to move forward

With decades of experience behind her, Professor Clair Sullivan has witnessed not only her own professional development, but also the evolution of CPD itself. Looking back, she can clearly see how the focus has shifted from documenting participation to demonstrating meaningful improvements in clinical practice.

“I think it also changes over your lifespan. Like when I started out, it was all about trying to get process [and] measures. So how do you tend to enough journal clubs? Have you reviewed enough papers? You know that sort of process measures that you have to have a certain number of hours doing activities.

“And then as I’ve matured, actually what I’m using CPD for is to genuinely look at my clinical outcomes and improve them. And I think that’s in some ways mirroring the whole landscape of CPD. It used to be, have you got enough hours going to Journal Club? Have you got enough hours going to grand rounds? And that was considered adequate CPD?

“I think now it’s not really. And you can use this as an opportunity to measure your own clinical outcomes. How are you doing? In my case that’s how am I measures of control in my patients? Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have known what that is, but now I can actually measure that. I can look at how I’m doing and try and do a bit better every year.”

For Professor Sullivan, that shift reflects the true purpose of CPD. Rather than simply recording educational activities, it has become a way of evaluating clinical practice, identifying opportunities for improvement and delivering better care for patients.

“So that’s a true, meaningful clinical improvement activity that results in better outcomes for my patients, better practice for me, and is meaningful and I find that something that delivers to my consumers in a way that simply attending a grand rounds might not.”