CPD Isn’t Just a Logbook: Why Support Matters More Than You Think
For many junior doctors, CPD arrives with a thud rather than a bang. One day you’re an intern or resident, your learning largely structured for you, your progression shaped by rosters, supervisors and training programs. The next, you’re told that you are responsible for designing and documenting your own professional development, mapping activities to categories, completing outcome measures, reflecting meaningfully on practice, and producing something that would stand up to scrutiny if audited. On paper, it sounds reasonable. In real life, it is confusing, time-consuming, and often poorly explained.
The CPD framework assumes a level of educational literacy that many doctors have never been formally taught. Most of us were trained to learn medicine, not to design learning programs for ourselves. Concepts like personal development plans, reflective practice, measuring outcomes, or designing a simple quality improvement activity are rarely taught explicitly in medical school or early postgraduate years. Yet suddenly they are regulatory requirements, and the consequences of getting them wrong can be serious.
This is where the idea of a “CPD Home” becomes more than an administrative requirement. In theory, a CPD Home is meant to support doctors to meet the Medical Board’s CPD standards. In practice, the experience of support varies enormously between providers. Some CPD Homes function primarily as registries. They provide a place to log activities, upload certificates, and generate reports. If you already know what you’re doing, that may be enough. If you don’t, the platform can feel like a blank form asking questions you don’t quite understand how to answer.
Experienced support is a critical element of a CPD Home
The difference becomes obvious the first time you try to do something slightly more complex than logging a conference. What counts as Measuring Outcomes? How do you design an audit that is small enough to be realistic but still meaningful? What does a defensible reflective entry actually look like, beyond vague statements about “learning points”? How do you translate everyday clinical work into CPD categories without either under-claiming or stretching the rules? These are not IT questions. They are educational and clinical questions. The quality of the answers you get depends heavily on whether the people supporting you actually understand medical education and clinical practice.
For junior doctors in particular, this matters. CPD is supposed to support development, not just compliance. When support is delivered by experienced clinicians and educators, the conversation shifts. Instead of being told “yes, you can log that” or “no, that doesn’t fit,” you start to get guidance on how to structure activities so that they genuinely improve practice. You learn how to turn routine clinical experiences into structured learning, how to design small quality improvement projects that are actually feasible in a busy hospital job, and how to reflect in a way that is honest and useful rather than performative. Over time, CPD stops feeling like a bureaucratic burden and starts to look more like a framework for making sense of your own professional growth.
There is also a practical reality here. Junior doctors are time-poor. When the interface is confusing, when help articles are thin or generic, or when support staff can only offer procedural answers rather than educational guidance, CPD becomes something that is deferred until the end of the year. That is when stress peaks, mistakes are made, and the whole exercise feels punitive rather than developmental. By contrast, platforms that embed support into the workflow — through clear guidance, well-written help articles, examples of good practice, and increasingly, intelligent tools that can guide users step by step — reduce the friction. They lower the barrier to engaging with CPD regularly, rather than in a last-minute scramble.
With decades of experience mentoring, supporting, educating and managing doctors, Osler’s Support Team is here to help you.
None of this is to suggest that every doctor needs hand-holding forever. Many senior clinicians are perfectly comfortable designing audits, reflective practice, and learning plans. But junior doctors are still forming their professional identity. They are learning not just medicine, but how to think about their own learning. A CPD Home that treats support as a core feature, rather than an afterthought, effectively acts as a bridge between being a trainee and being a self-directed professional.
It is also worth being honest about what doctors are actually paying for when they choose a CPD Home. You are not just buying a compliance badge. You are buying a service that sits quietly in the background of your professional life, shaping how you engage with learning. If that service is little more than a filing system, then CPD will feel like filing. If that service is designed by people who understand clinical work, educational theory, and the realities of being a junior doctor, then CPD has a chance of becoming something closer to what it was always meant to be: a scaffold for becoming a better doctor over time.
In the end, all accredited CPD Homes will technically allow you to meet the Medical Board’s requirements. The more interesting question for junior doctors is not “which one is compliant?” but “which one will actually help me learn how to do CPD properly?” The answer to that question is often found in the quality of support.