Your Essential Guide to CPD for Health Visitors
Your Essential Guide to CPD for Health Visitors
Health visitors are NMC-registered nurses or midwives who have chosen to specialise in family and community health. As part of the role of a health visitor, they provide essential support and advice to families with babies and young children. They play a vital role in the health of the nation, helping to lay the foundation for the child’s future health at a critical point in their life.
Whether you’re currently employed as a health visitor, a training manager who plans training for nurses or someone who’s thinking about a career as a health visitor, CPD training is something you’ll need to consider.
CPD (Continuing Professional Development) is not just a mandatory requirement but also an invaluable tool for your professional growth.
This essential guide to Continuing Professional Development for Health Visitors will cover the key points you need to know about planning CPD, and how online healthcare training courses can support your CPD training programme.
Why is Continuous Professional Development important for Health Visitors?
There are many benefits of Continuous Professional Development for health visitors.
First of all,there’s a mandatory requirement for nurses and health visitors to undertake regular CPD as part of the NMC’s revalidation process. If they fail to meet the compulsory CPD requirements, they can be removed from the NMC register and would no longer be able to work as a nurse or health visitor.
In addition, the healthcare sector is a fast-moving field that sees frequent developments in techniques, technology and best practice. CPD training ensures that health visitors are updated with the latest trends, research and changes in legislation so that they can provide the best possible care and advice.
Finally, as a health visitor, investing in Continuous Professional Development will underpin your career development and demonstrate your commitment to the sector.
CPD courses for Health Visitors
There are several types of Continuous Professional Development training that health visitors can use to meet the NMC’s mandatory CPD requirements. These CPD activities could range from attending webinars and in-person conferences to reading relevant journals, books and articles.
Online training courses are one of the most convenient forms of CPD training for health visitors. Caredemy healthcare training programmes make it possible to study CPD online courses at any convenient time or place, and you can also download the course materials for offline study if that fits into your schedule more easily.
You can track your progress through the course on the Caredemy Learner Dashboard, so it’s easy to pick up from where you left the course in your last study session. And because Caredemy online healthcare courses are CPD accredited, they will count towards your CPD points requirement.
CPD topics for health visitors
It’s essential to take a consistent approach to planning your CPD online training. Health visitors should carefully select courses to meet their own professional development needs and consider any areas where they feel they have gaps in their knowledge.
Many Caredemy courses are suitable for health visitor CPD training. Some examples of suitable CPD courses for health visitors include:
Other general courses which may be useful include topics such as:
- Health, Safety and Welfare in Primary Care
- Safe Handling of Sharps and Needles
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Training
These courses will deepen your knowledge and enhance your skills so that you can offer more effective support to the families in your care.
Logging CPD hours: keeping track of your progress
CPD isn’t just about attending a course and filing away your CPD certificate. It’s an ongoing process, and logging the hours you devote to CPD training is vital. Health visitors must keep track of how often they need to renew your CPD training certificates and closely monitor their CPD requirements and deadlines. This is vital to maintain their professional certification.
Logging CPD hours might mean saving attendance confirmations from your webinar training sessions, documenting the journals and papers you read and keeping track of tutor or mentor sessions.
When you pass the exam at the end of a Caredemy course, you can download a nationally-recognised CPD certificate to add to your portfolio as evidence of your CPD hours. A varied CPD portfolio will indicate that you’re taking a comprehensive, 360-degree approach to your professional development.
Training managers can plan their staff training programme with the help of the Caredemy Learner Management System (LMS), which makes it easy to track CPD hours and collate CPD certificates at inspection time. Please get in touch with our Sales team for more details about Caredemy CPD training and migrating your training programme to the Caredemy LMS.
The role of a health visitor is more than just a job; it’s a calling to safeguard future generations and empower families. And CPD training is about more than mandatory compliance with regulations; it’s about becoming the best health visitor you can be.
