How you might supply evidence of what you've undertaken
When you put together your profile, you also need to send in evidence to support your personal statement.
Evidence examples
This list should give you an idea of the kinds of evidence of your CPD you could provide. (This list has been adapted from work done by the Allied Health Professions’ project ‘Demonstrating competence through CPD’ (2003).)
- Information leaflets
- Case studies
- Critical reviews
- Policies or position statements
- Documents about national or local processes
- Reports (for example, on project work or audits or reviews)
- Business plans
- Procedures
- Guidance materials
- Guidelines for dealing with service users
- Course assignments
- Action plans Course programme documents
- Presentations you have given
- Articles for journals
- Questionnaires
- Research papers, proposals, funding applications
- Induction materials for new members of staff
- Learning contracts
- Contributions to the work of a professional body
- Contributions to the work of a special-interest group
- Adapted documents arising from appraisals, supervision reviews and so on
- Documents about following local or national schemes relating to CPD
- Evaluations of courses or conferences you have been to
- Personal development plans
- Approved claims for credit for previous learning or experience
- Testimonials
- Letters from service users, carers, students or colleagues
- Course certificate
We know that it can be difficult to provide evidence for some of our standards. For example, when you are describing how your CPD has benefited the quality of your work, or benefited service users, your personal statement may need to describe how you believe that this has happened. You may be able to support this with evidence of, for example, an altered way of working which you think has improved the quality of your work. You may have evidence of a meeting with your manager where you discussed using new skills you had learnt, or you may have evidence of how you personally planned to make changes to systems or practices. If your record of CPD activities includes a place where you write about how you will use the knowledge you have gained, then this could be useful evidence. These types of evidence are evidence of the effects of your activities. This, alongside the evidence of your CPD activities themselves, will help to show the CPD assessors how you meet our standards.
Amount of evidence needed
In your personal record of CPD activities you may have a large amount of evidence relating to certain activities. However, you do not need to send us all of this information. You need to look at the information you have, decide which activities show how you meet our standards, and then decide what evidence to send to us.
You can refer to the assessment criteria in our document CPD and your registration to make sure you have provided relevant supporting information to show how you meet each of the standards.
We do not have detailed guidelines on how much evidence you should send us, but you should bear in mind that the CPD assessors will need to see enough information to be sure that the CPD activity has taken place.
As far as we can, we will put in place systems to keep your information safe. However, when you send items through the post, there is always the possibility that they may be lost.
For this reason you should only send us copies of your supporting documents. Do not send us any original documents.
The CPD assessors may sometimes ask to see original documents. If this is the case, we will contact you to let you know, and to discuss the best way for you to provide us with those documents.
In all aspects of your work you must maintain patient confidentiality. This is part of your responsibility under our Standards of conduct, performance and ethics.
Some of the information you may want to send us may contain patients’ details. If this is the case, please remove any details that could allow us to identify the patients. Your supporting evidence will normally be in the form of documents, so to maintain confidentiality.
The HCPC has no objection to registrants using templates or exemplar documents to assist them in preparing their CPD profiles, but the use of standard documents or text from profiles prepared by other registrants or third parties is inappropriate, as a CPD profile should be both a registrant's own work and a true reflection of their own CPD activity.
We understand that some professionals may want to ensure that the CPD assessors who assess their profile are not able to identify them.
This is why we have allocated each registrant who is audited a CPD number, which is separate from your HCPC registration number (your HCPC registration number is publicly available via the online Register to anyone who wants to check your registration).
If you do want to make sure that your profile is assessed anonymously, then please carefully remove any information from the evidence you submit that could identify you.
Please note that HCPC employees will still be able to link your CPD number to your registration record, so that we can let you know the outcome of the assessment. HCPC employees will not share this information with CPD assessors.
Still have a question about CPD?
For more information about CPD, please contact our team: