Recent posts
Anna Jellema, 2013. ACAT Membership and auditing ACAT CPD. Reformulation, Winter, p.10.
As this issue of Reformulation is going to press, you will have heard from Susan van Baars our Administration Manager about renewing your ACAT Membership by the end of October. When we renew our Membership, as the declaration states, we also agree to abide by the ACAT CPD Policy as a condition of our Membership. You can find the CPD Policy via your own Home Page under Resources and Downloads > Official Documents. Please read it through carefully – it was revised in September 2011, and under “Standards” (point 5), the Policy now reads: “20 hours of (CPD) needs to be relevant to your CAT practice”. This is a change from the previous version which required 20 hours of CAT-specific CPD, and means that most ACAT Members should now have little difficulty in accruing the required CPD hours. (Please also read through the document, “Supervision Requirements across ACAT”).
The CPD policy offers some suggestions as to how to record your CPD. We know that the majority of ACAT Members also belong to other professional bodies, e.g. BPS, which have their own formats for CPD, so we are not imposing a set way of recording it – what really matters is that you do plan your CPD and also make some ongoing record of your CPD activity, with supporting evidence (e.g. course certificates) where available.
This is the second year that ACAT Council of Management has audited Members’ CPD. Each summer we select a random 2.5% of the Practitioner and of the Psychotherapist Membership to check whether your CPD meets our standards. If you are selected for audit we send you a form to complete, which is an expanded version of the section in the Policy, “CPD Profile”. The CPD audit results are ratified at the October Exam Board meeting and Members selected for audit will be notified individually of their own result. At the last Exam Board held on 11th October 2013, 10 out of 12 Practitioner Members and 3 out of 4 Psychotherapist members passed their audit first time. Members who do not meet the criteria are usually asked to resubmit and are selected again for CPD audit the following year.
We really want to stress the importance of CPD – besides being a requirement, once we are no longer in formal training we all need to demonstrate that we are keeping up to date in our practice to help provide the best possible service to our clients, patients, supervisees and trainees.