Continuing Professional Development

The Conference Committee has applied to the APS for CPD endorsement for this conference - people with endorsement in clinical neuropsychology will be able to use conference points towards their PsyBA requirement of 30 CPD points per year, and CCN members will be able to claim under the APS requirement for neuropsychology CPD points. Other psychologists will be able to claim CPD points for attending the conference - if you feel that the events you attend are relevant to your area of endorsed practice, you are able to claim towards that area, as long as you document the activity and the relevance to your area as per the PsyBA rules.

A note on "Active CPD"

We hope to make every (nonsocial) activity at the conference suitable for attendees to claim Active CPD points, though providing questions to test learning at the end. We are asking presenters to prepare questions, but we will provide them if the presenters don't! The professional practice forums on the second day of the conference might even constitute a form of peer supervision for attendees

There seems to be a common misconception that conference attendance does not normally count towards 'Active CPD' because there needs to be evidence of learning such as an 'assessment' at some point in the talk or workshop.

This belief about active CPD and conferences is incorrect.

The PsyBA Guidelines on CPD show that Active CPD is much easier to obtain than the common narrow interpretation that it must involve assessment. The Guidelines state:

Active CPD
Ten (10) hours each year are recommended to be 'active CPD' which refers to continuous professional development activities that engage the participant in active training through written or oral activities designed to enhance and test learning. This is a recommendation of the Board, not a requirement.
Examples of 'active' CPD include the following:
• attending seminars where there is a written test
• reading a structured series of professional psychology articles followed by completing an online assessment
• giving an oral presentation or tutorial to a group of peers on a new topic in psychology
• providing peer consultation to others
• attending a workshop which requires in vivo role play of skills;
• studying a new technique, followed by trialling this technique in the workplace, and a review and evaluation of the effectiveness and implementation of that technique (italics and underlining added.)

If the definition of active CPD is "activities that engage the participant in active training through written or oral activities designed to enhance and test learning", then even if a conference doesn't provide a written test or online assessment, if a psychologist engages in writing reflective, evaluative notes about the presentation afterwards, testing themselves on what they learnt after the presentation and writing down the answers, or talking to others about the presentation afterwards (in a formal, reflective way, like an oral report), then they could class it as Active CPD - This strategy is detailed in the Guidelines of Area of Practice Endorsement in the section on Active CPD for Registrars (p.8):

Where activities are not inherently active, the supervisor must be involved to ensure that the activities become active. For example, if CPD activities are not inherently active, the supervisor must set written work or another activity (for example, an oral report) to meet the active requirement.

Active CPD is only mandatory for people on the registrar program. It is recommended, but not required, for all other psychologists.