No new CPD homes on the block, yet

The colleges have lost their duopoly on CPD services, but so far no other organisations have been accredited.

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What could have been CPDageddon for ACRRM and the RACGP has come and gone with barely a whisper, but the colleges aren’t out of the woods yet.

For the past year, the focus of the profession-wide CPD restructure has been firmly on the controversial requirement for doctors to write a personal CPD plan and reflection, and spend at least 25 hours reviewing performance and measuring outcomes each year.

But the other major change tied to the shakeup was that third-party organisations can now apply to be Australian Medical Council accredited CPD homes.

Doctors have until January 2024 to settle on a CPD home – until then, anyone doing self-directed CPD can continue doing so.

This change effectively breaks up the RACGP-ACRRM duopoly on CPD management services for GPs; in theory, it’s now possible to manage all CPD recording and reporting activities independently of a medical college.

With this comes the potential for a large-scale college exodus, as members (and non-members who had been obliged to pay one of the colleges for CPD management) abandon ship in search of a cheaper option.

The stakes are high.

In practice though, quite literally nothing has changed.

The AMA’s WA branch is the only non-college organisation which has successfully registered as an AMC accredited CPD home; the rest are colleges.

Even though it has been awarded initial accreditation, the AMA WA CPD home – which trades as Doctorportal Learning – has not yet got a confirmed commencement date.

Although specifically linked to the AMA WA, Doctorportal’s CPD tracking service appears to be free for anyone with a federal AMA account.

AMA members also receive a discount on paid learning modules offered by Doctorportal. The tracker is free for non-members, but learning modules start at $11 a pop.

Applying to become an accredited CPD home will set an organisation back $6500, and there are only two accreditation rounds each year: once in April and once in August.

Medical education provider Healthed, which had initially considered becoming an accredited CPD home, elected not to apply.

“The bureaucratic requirements were very significant and we weren’t sure whether or not the additional administrative costs would be justified,” Healthed CEO Dr Ramesh Manocha said.

The amount of money needed, he told The Medical Republic, would likely outweigh the anticipated benefits of the few new customers that the offering would attract.

Dr Manocha also acknowledged that the colleges have far more resources than a company like Healthed, and no imperative to turn a profit.

“The RACGP CPD home can be subsidised by its thousands and thousands of [members],” he said.

“It could run it for a long time with negative revenue and still do it well.”

The sheer scale of the changes to the CPD system were another reason to hold back.

“My understanding of where GPs’ heads are at is that the changes to the actual CPD system are so profound that they are going to take a year or two to get their head around it,” Dr Manocha said.

“In the process of understanding and acclimatising to the new CPD, they don’t want to change everything else as well.”

Dr Manocha believes that after a few years, once the dust settles, doctors will start to trickle out of the medical colleges in search of a better deal.

“All of those [confusion and caution] factors will start to wear off in the next two or three years, and then people will start to question whether or not the college is offering value for its CPD component,” he said.

Associate Professor Stephen Barnett, medical director of CPD provider Medcast, said the organisation had also initially thought about applying for CPD home status, but elected not to.

If Medcast were to become a CPD home, it would essentially be in direct competition with the colleges.

“We thought we could support users best by offering to make to make sure they can meet their needs, and to actually work with the standards bodies,” he told TMR.

By keeping itself “agnostic”, Medcast is able to continue to work closely with the larger organisations.

It’s not clear whether any other organisations will receive CPD-home accreditation over the coming months.

The Australian Medical Council, medical education provider Healthcert and Doctorportal Learning did not respond to a request for comment before deadline.