Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is essential for our members, enabling you to learn and develop throughout your career, keeping your knowledge and skills up to date to ensure you can practice safely and effectively. The BDA approach is that members at all levels of the profession should have access to formal and informal CPD opportunities they need for employment and personal fulfilment in their professional role of choice.
This lifelong learning is each practitioner’s responsibility but the BDA is also responsible for providing and promoting a range of CPD opportunities to support the highest standards of practice.
Our community is fortunate that there is so much CPD designed to support practice, but with so many events, study days, podcasts, publications, webinars and articles on offer, it can be hard to prioritise and make time for CPD. In our recent 2022 BDA members survey, we asked you about which CPD opportunities you most value across a wide range of BDA and partner initiatives. You really value the BDA core events, training, eLearning and publications - plus all our specialist groups and branches offer - but 84% of members said they also value BDA endorsement on third-party CPD activities.
Members will previously have seen ‘Endorsed for CPD’ on a range of both BDA and third-party CPD. Our team have recently reviewed this process and last month we are launched ‘BDA CPD Approval’. BDA CPD Approval is a flexible tool which can be applied across a range of learning activities including conferences and events, training, online CPD resources, written materials such as articles and broadcast materials such as educational podcasts.
The new ‘BDA Approved’ logo is a mark of approval for trusted CPD activities and resources. Applications are screened by a cross function internal team, and then assessed against our Approval Standards by an external CPD assessor.
Through our CPD Approval service, we want to maximise the amount and variety of CPD activities available to you, and ensure you have awareness of all the opportunities available. To support this, we are introducing our new BDA CPD Approved Hub, where you can view all of the learning activities we have approved, and access these at your leisure. You can filter these according to topics, to help target your needs.
Najia Qureshi, Director for Education and Professional Practice said:
BDA CPD Approval will offer a consistent mark of approval that members can be confident meets the learning aims and, with the appropriate reflection, will support practice. The hub will develop over time into a one stop shop for non-BDA CPD to support the whole dietetic workforce.
If you are a provider of CPD for the dietetic workforce and want to find out more about gaining the ‘BDA Approved’ mark please visit our pages here.