In the fifth article in our series, Asha Fowells charts her experience of the revalidation process so far...

This month I made my first planned CPD entry. With some trepidation, I logged onto the myGPhC portal. In itself, this felt like a small victory, with the realisation that I could use my email and therefore didn’t need my GPhC registration number (which I always have to look up) and only taking three attempts to get my password right.

Anxious

I was anxious about making a CPD entry. My experience with the uptodate platform meant that, for me, logging CPD activities is up there with chores such as doing my tax return or weeding the garden – but my worries soon disappeared.

From the home screen, I clicked on the (large and unmissable) revalidation box. This took me to a screen for creating, managing and submitting revalidation records, with a mere five sections:

• Current submission (subdivided into planned and unplanned CPD)
• Excluded entries (presumably will become populated if I make more than the minimum number of logs and submit only a selected few)
• Progress (detailing the time period during which I can submit my records)
• Past submissions (of which there are none)
• More information. Each section has a green information icon, which gives a series of explanations as to what is expected.

Clicking on the big ‘plus’ symbol next to “planned CPD”, I went into a template form. Again, this was clear and simple, requiring me to insert a title that described the CPD entry, then answer three questions on what I was intending to learn, how I was intending to learn it and how it would benefit the users of my service. Once more, green information icons provided more helpful details on what to include in each section.

It was quick. It was easy. And I didn’t need to repeat myself. It prompted me to reflect on what I had done, why I had done it, and how it had informed the work that I do. It was as it should be.

Good feeling

I saved my work but when I went back to the home page my revalidation section was showing zero records. When I clicked back in, I realised I hadn’t marked the entry as complete.

Once I did that and went back to the home page, my revalidation status became “in progress” with one out of four records done. That felt really good.

Logging CPD has now moved slightly up my to-do list. I don’t have a massive drive to do it in the same way that I research potential purchases online (should anyone be interested, my current preoccupation is pizza ovens), but it has certainly moved from “really painful” into the territory of “things that are worse to think about than do and actually make me feel good when I’ve done them”. A bit like the washing up or sorting the kids’ school uniforms.

I may even try to get ahead and get all my CPD logged before I can submit my revalidation records from the beginning of September.