Participating in forum discussions and reading or viewing content on www.vetsurgeon.org counts towards the average 35 hours of documented Continuing Professional Development you are required to undertake each year.

To count towards your CPD requirement, your activities must be part of a documented process of appraisal and development. In other words, you must keep a record of your activity and how it has contributed to your professional development.

COMING SOON:

CLAIM CPD
In various sections of VetSturgeon.org, you will see a button marked 'Claim CPD' towards the top right of the screen, adjacent to the search box.

Click that link, and a drop down box appears, into which you enter the time you have spent (in minutes) on the subject of the page. In addition, you may enter notes to remind you what you learned and how you plan to use the information.

Press submit, and your entry is added to your CPD record in your personal profile (which is visible only to you).

If you later return to the page and spend more time on the subject, you can click the button again and amend the record.

You can use 'Claim CPD' to record a number of different CPD-qualifying activities on VetSurgeon.org. any content which can reasonably be argued to advance your knowledge and proficiency as a vet, including forum discussion threads, news articles and videos on VetSurgeon.org counts towards your annual CPD requirement.:

FORUMS
You can claim the time you spend posting, replying to and reading forum posts on VetSurgeon.org. Now there is even more reason than ever before to participate in the forums and share knowledge, because although you can claim time spent reading, you can claim even more time when you post questions and reply to others.

If you post a reply to a question, and needed to research your answer, the time you spend researching and posting your answer also counts as CPD. So, if you are a specialist answering a question in your sleep, that doesn't count. But if the question made you think, and you need to check your facts, that does.

To count towards your CPD allowance, your forum posts must concern a subject which can reasonably be argued to advance your knowledge and proficiency as a veterinary surgeon (so RCVS-bashing posts won't qualify!)

NEWS
You may decide that reading a short news story hardly warrants creating a record of the two minutes you spent. But if you read a story that caused you to research a subject in greater detail, either on the site or elsewhere, then record the total time you spent on it.

CPD
If you attend a CPD qualifying event listed on VetSurgeon.org, you can add it to your VetSurgeon.org CPD record. Handy if the event organiser didn't provide a certificate or you lost it!

GALLERIES
Time spent watching videos on VetSurgeon.org can count towards your CPD record, as can submitting images for comment by one of our curators.

Further information about CPD requirements is available from the RCVS website: http://www.rcvs.org.uk/cpd