The HCPC sets no CPD hours target. It sets five standards, and it audits a random 2.5 per cent of each profession at every renewal. If you are selected, you submit a written CPD profile showing how your learning met those standards over the previous two years — and “I did 30 hours of training” is not an answer to the question being asked.
This guide covers all five standards, how the audit works, what a profile that passes actually contains, and where online courses genuinely fit for the fifteen professions the HCPC regulates.
At a glance: Nexis CPD offers £9 CPD-accredited online courses relevant to health and care practice, with a verifiable e-certificate on passing — and any three courses cost £18.
Who the HCPC regulates
The HCPC register covers a broad range of professions, including paramedics, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, radiographers, biomedical scientists, dietitians, speech and language therapists, podiatrists, prosthetists and orthotists, operating department practitioners, clinical scientists, hearing aid dispensers, orthoptists, arts therapists and practitioner psychologists.
That breadth explains the design of the CPD system. A single hours target that suited a hospital radiographer would be meaningless for a self-employed podiatrist or an arts therapist in a school. So the HCPC uses what it calls a flexible, outcomes-based approach: your CPD must connect to your own scope of practice, and you decide what that means.
The five standards
Registrants must:
- Maintain a continuous, up-to-date and accurate record of their CPD activities
- Demonstrate that their CPD activities are a mixture of learning activities relevant to current or future practice
- Seek to ensure that their CPD has contributed to the quality of their practice and service delivery
- Seek to ensure that their CPD benefits the service user
- Upon request, present a written profile (which must be their own work and supported by evidence) explaining how they have met the standards for CPD
Read them closely and three things stand out. The record must be continuous, not assembled at renewal. The activities must be a mixture, not five instances of the same webinar series. And two of the five standards are about effect — on your practice, and on the service user — which is where most weak profiles fall down.
How the audit actually works
At each renewal the HCPC randomly selects 2.5 per cent of each profession and asks them to submit a CPD profile. Selection is random: it is not triggered by a complaint, your employer, or anything you have done.
If you are selected, you submit a profile covering your activities over the previous two years, with supporting evidence, explaining how you met the five standards. The profile must be your own work.
A useful way to think about it: the assessor is not marking your learning. They are checking whether you can show a link between what you learned and what changed in your practice. A list of certificates does not show that. A short, specific account of one piece of learning and the change it produced does.
What “relevant to your scope of practice” means in practice
Scope of practice is the area in which you have the knowledge, skills and experience to practise lawfully, safely and effectively. It is personal, and it moves — a physiotherapist who takes on a respiratory on-call rota, a paramedic who moves into primary care, an OT who starts supervising students. Each of those changes what “relevant” means for CPD.
Two practical consequences. First, if your role changes mid-cycle, say so in the profile and show learning that tracks the change: the assessor is looking for coherence between your practice and your CPD, not for a fixed subject list. Second, learning aimed at a future scope is explicitly allowed by standard two, so preparation for a role you are moving into counts, provided you can explain the link.
What a profile that passes looks like
A strong profile usually contains four things:
- A summary of your practice. What your role actually involves, so the assessor can judge relevance. A community paramedic, an ITU physiotherapist and a paediatric SLT have very different scopes, and “relevant” means relevant to yours.
- A dated list of CPD activities showing a mixture of types — not just courses.
- A statement of how the activities meet the standards, written in your words.
- Evidence, attached and referenced: certificates, reflective notes, supervision records, feedback, protocols you wrote, audit results.
The mixture the HCPC is looking for
Standard two asks for a mixture of learning activities. In practice that means drawing from several of these:
- Work-based learning — reflective practice, supervision, case discussion, audit, significant event analysis, in-service training, shadowing, mentoring
- Professional activity — teaching or supervising students, involvement in a professional body, presenting at a meeting, being an expert witness
- Formal education — courses, conferences, modules, research
- Self-directed learning — reading journals and guidelines, reviewing evidence, updating a protocol
Self-directed learning counts. It just cannot be the whole picture, and it needs a note of what you took from it.
Writing the “so what” that assessors look for
Standards three and four are the ones that separate a passing profile from a returned one. Both ask about effect: on the quality of your practice and service delivery, and on the service user.
A worked comparison makes the difference obvious.
Weak: “Attended a study day on falls prevention. Very informative and covered risk assessment tools.”
Strong: “Attended a study day on falls prevention because three of my caseload had unexplained falls in six months and our screening felt inconsistent. I had assumed our existing tool covered medication review; it does not. I now check the medication list at first assessment and flag anticholinergic burden to the GP. Two patients have since had medication changes, and my team has adopted the same check — we added a prompt to the assessment template in June.”
The second version answers all four content standards in a paragraph, and the evidence would be the template change and the study day certificate.
Timing and records
Renewal comes around every two years for each profession on a published cycle, and your CPD record should cover that period continuously. Two habits make audit painless:
- Log on the day. Ten minutes after an activity, while you can still name what you would do differently.
- Keep the evidence with the entry. Reconstructing certificates and notes two years later is the single most common reason people scramble.
You also make a declaration at renewal that you have met the CPD standards. Making that declaration without a record is a professional risk quite separate from being audited, because the declaration itself is a statement about your practice.
Five reasons profiles get returned
- Certificates with no reflection. The most common failure. The evidence proves attendance; nothing shows what changed.
- A single activity type. Standard two asks for a mixture. Twenty online modules is not a mixture.
- No link to service users. Standard four is explicit, and it is the one people forget entirely.
- Evidence that identifies patients. Anonymise properly. A reflective account with identifiable details is a confidentiality problem in a document you have handed to your regulator.
- Written at the last minute. Profiles assembled in a fortnight read like it, because the detail that makes reflection convincing has been forgotten.
If you are self-employed or work outside the NHS
A large share of HCPC registrants work in private practice, in schools, for agencies, or across several employers. Nobody provides your CPD or reminds you about it, and a lot of the standard advice assumes an employer with a study budget and an appraisal cycle.
Three adjustments help. Use professional body networks and special interest groups for the participatory and professional-activity side. Treat peer supervision — even a regular call with one other practitioner — as a genuine CPD activity, and record it. And build evidence from your own work: an updated protocol, an audit of your own outcomes, a leaflet you rewrote after patient feedback. That material is often stronger evidence than a course certificate, because it demonstrates effect directly.
Returning to practice or taking a break
If you have been out of practice, the HCPC’s returning to practice requirements apply and are separate from routine CPD: the amount of updating you must do depends on how long you were away. Parental leave, illness and career breaks do not exempt you from the CPD standards for the period you were registered and practising, but the profile is judged against your actual practice, so a period of leave is context the assessor needs rather than a problem to hide. Say plainly what the period covered and what you did on return.
Where online courses fit — honestly
Self-paced online learning is legitimate CPD for HCPC purposes, and it counts as formal education or self-directed learning depending on how it is structured. Two honest limits:
- It cannot be your whole portfolio. Standard two requires a mixture, and a profile made only of online certificates fails on that standard alone.
- The certificate is not the CPD. The learning entry — what you took from it, what changed — is what the assessor reads. That part is yours to write, and no provider can write it for you.
What online courses do well is cover the cross-cutting areas every HCPC profession touches but few pre-registration programmes cover in depth, and which employers increasingly require evidence of.
Regulator CPD and employer mandatory training are different things
Most HCPC registrants carry two separate training obligations, and conflating them causes real problems at audit.
Your employer’s mandatory training — moving and handling, fire safety, information governance, resuscitation, safeguarding — exists to meet the employer’s legal duties. It is usually annual or biennial, it is tracked centrally, and completing it is a condition of employment.
Your HCPC CPD exists to meet your professional standards. It is yours, it follows you between jobs, and the HCPC judges it against your scope of practice.
The overlap is real: mandatory training can absolutely be logged as CPD where it is relevant and you reflect on it. But a portfolio consisting solely of employer mandatory training tends to fail standard two, because it is a fixed menu set by someone else rather than a mixture chosen against your own development needs. If you move employers, that training record may also stay behind — another argument for keeping your own copy.
Evidence you could gather this month
- A reflective note on one case that did not go as expected, anonymised
- A record of one supervision or peer discussion, with what you took from it
- A guideline or piece of evidence you read, and the practice point you changed
- Feedback from a service user or colleague, and your response to it
- Any teaching, student supervision or team briefing you delivered
Five entries of that kind, spread over a cycle and each with a sentence about effect, will satisfy the standards more convincingly than a folder of certificates.
Which courses suit HCPC registrants?
- Consent in Health and Social Care — valid consent, capacity and refusal
- Mental Capacity Act — capacity assessment and best interests (see the five principles)
- Infection Prevention and Control — standard precautions across clinical settings (see our IPC guide)
Those three together cost £18 rather than £27, because any three courses trigger the pay-for-2-get-3 offer. Add them to the cart and the discount applies automatically. Depending on your caseload, Safeguarding Adults, DoLS, Sepsis Awareness or Duty of Care may sit closer to your scope of practice.
Nurses follow an entirely different system through the NMC — see CPD requirements for nurses — and social workers a third one again through Social Work England. Advice written for one regulator is routinely, and wrongly, applied to another.
Frequently asked questions
How many CPD hours do HCPC registrants need?
None. The HCPC does not set an hours target. It sets five standards for CPD and takes an outcomes-based approach, so what matters is that your activities are recorded continuously, are a mixture of types, are relevant to your scope of practice, and have improved your practice and benefited service users.
How does the HCPC CPD audit work?
At each renewal the HCPC randomly selects 2.5 per cent of each profession and asks them to submit a CPD profile covering the previous two years, with supporting evidence, explaining how they met the five standards. Selection is random rather than triggered by anything you have done, and the profile must be your own work.
What are the five HCPC standards for CPD?
Registrants must maintain a continuous, up-to-date and accurate record of their CPD; demonstrate that their activities are a mixture of learning relevant to current or future practice; seek to ensure their CPD has contributed to the quality of their practice and service delivery; seek to ensure it benefits the service user; and, on request, present a written profile supported by evidence explaining how they met the standards.
What should an HCPC CPD profile include?
A summary of your role so the assessor can judge relevance, a dated list of activities showing a mixture of types, a statement in your own words of how these meet the standards, and evidence attached and referenced. The strongest profiles explain what changed in practice as a result, because two of the five standards are about the effect of your learning.
Do online courses count for HCPC CPD?
Yes, as one type of activity. Self-paced online learning counts as formal education or self-directed learning, but it cannot be your whole portfolio because the standards require a mixture of activity types. The certificate evidences that you completed the activity; the learning entry describing what changed in your practice is what an assessor actually reads.
Which professions does the HCPC regulate?
The HCPC regulates a broad range of health and care professions including paramedics, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, radiographers, biomedical scientists, dietitians, speech and language therapists, podiatrists, operating department practitioners, clinical scientists, hearing aid dispensers, orthoptists, prosthetists and orthotists, arts therapists and practitioner psychologists. Nurses and midwives are regulated separately by the NMC.
CPD courses for health and care professionals
£9 per course. CPD accredited, 100% online, verifiable e-certificate. Pay for 2, get 3 — any 3 courses for £18.
This article is general information, not legal advice or a statement of HCPC policy. Nexis CPD is not an HCPC-approved provider, and a CPD awareness course is not a regulated qualification. Whether an activity meets the HCPC standards depends on your scope of practice, your record and the evidence you keep. Always confirm current requirements with the Health and Care Professions Council.