What Continuing Professional Development is

Discovery Health in partnership with MyCPD provides the Continued Professional Development (CPD) service for free at doctor conferences and talks.

The Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) require all registered healthcare professionals to improve their knowledge, skills and ethical attitudes through attending accredited continuing education activities throughout the year. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) assists healthcare professionals to get new information and as such stay current and competent with new skills and advancements in the field. This benefits the healthcare professional, the profession and ultimately the patient.

The guidelines issued by the HPCSA allocate Continuing Education Units (CEUs) at one point per hour for attending Continuing Professional Development (CPD) accredited activities. The activity must be accredited by an approved CPD service provider appointed by the HPCSA. CEUs are valid for 24 months from date of attendance. Healthcare professionals must aim to accumulate 60 points over this period of which at least 10 must be on medical ethics.

MyCPD is a FREE online system that:

  • Automatically captures data from conferences facilitated by MyCPD and Discovery.
  • Keeps a history of all your CPD points.
  • Automatically shows which of your certificates are active and archives events older than 24 months.
  • Helps you capture certificates from other events that you have attended for a full electronic record.
  • Gives you options to print or download your certificates.
  • Submits audit reports directly from the website.

Discovery Health has been involved in providing educational support at medical conferences in South Africa since 2004. In particular we specialise in the facilitation of the CPD process. We offer this as a free service. We utilise handheld scanners to log the CPD data and store it on the website www.mycpd.co.za. Each delegate requiring CEUs receives a barcoded name tag which has the relevant information for the logging of their data. This information is uploaded to the website after the conference. Delegates receive an e-mail notification with a user name and password with which they can access the MyCPD site and are able to download their certificates within seven to 10 working days after the conference closes. International delegates receive a certificate of attendance with all the relevant CPD information (if they give us their contact details).