Coping With The Registration Standard For Dental Cpd

By Author: Abinash Mallick
Total Articles: 21
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As a registered and licensed dental practitioner in Australia, you are required to accumulate a minimum number of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) hours. The Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, which is enforces in each state and territory of the country, mandates that registered professionals engage in CPD throughout their career or practice. A Registration Standard regarding dental CPD has thus been enacted by the Australian Board of Dentistry to serve as guidelines for dental practitioners as to how to fulfill this requirement. Since then, the awareness of and search for accredited CPD programs and activities have increased.

Making continuing education mandatory has, however, become an additional load to the responsibilities of a dental practitioner. The dental practitioner typically averages about 40 hours of work in a week. In a truly busy and successful dental clinic, work hours may be even longer in order to accommodate the number of patients seeking dental treatment. Furthermore, a dental practitioner knows that hearing the sound of the dental handpiece means that there is income entering ...
... the business, which is important for the practitioner's livelihood. When it is silent or the clinic is closed, it is almost automatically expected that financial problems will appear. As such, dental practitioners try not to enter circumstances that will hinder them from accommodating patients.

One such circumstance is when the dental practitioner must take leave from work to attend oral health programs and activities in order to fulfill the requirement for CPD. Online dental learning programs become a solution to this problem. With online based courses, you are able to participate in accredited learning activities at a time most convenient for you, without it having to interfere with time for work and other important daily responsibilities, such as that for the home and family. In addition, web-based dental education may be easily accessed from any location for as long as there is internet connection available. Should you find yourself with free time or down time in the clinic, at home or even out of town, you may easily complete a short course that will automatically add to your record of CPD. This characteristic of online education being convenient and flexible allows it to be easily incorporated into your routine.

As stated in the Registration Standard for dental CPD, a practitioner must acquire a minimum of sixty (60) hours of activities within a three-year duration. It is sometimes the case that a busy professional forgets about participating in programs or activities, especially when caught up in running and maintaining the dental clinic, and needs to catch up towards the end just to fulfill the requirement. This forfeits the purpose of why continuing education was advocated, which is for you to have constant education about your profession, job, vocation in order to assure that proper, adequate and safe service is given to the public. Through participation in online courses, that kind of situation may be avoided because you can decide for yourself and set suitable study time daily, weekly or monthly depending on your preference.

The Registration Standard for dental CPD requires that the practitioner maintains a log book or record of all accredited activities accomplished. This will serve as evidence for compliance to the National Law and can be presented in certain circumstances, such as when a practitioner is to be audited by the Dental Board. Participating in various CPD activities – seminars, workshops, conventions, etc – may sometimes cause you to forget or neglect to input corresponding hour credits. With online based continuing education programs, you can use their offered service of a digital log book to monitor your accomplishments and progress. You may also attain hard copies of your records or request for a certificate of participation when necessary. In addition, because this is web-based, you may be able to access the data from anywhere in the world for as long as you are able to connect to the internet.

The making of dental CPD a requirement has moved the Board of Dentistry to create a Registration Standard that will guide dental practitioners in complying with the National Law. There are many sources for activities or programs, but possibly the one source that makes it easiest to cope with the CPD requirement is online based courses. This is because of the attributes that make it suitable for busy dental practitioners, such as its accessibility at any time of the day and from anywhere there is internet. It may hence be said that coping with the Registration Standard for Dental CPD is facilitated by online continuing education courses.

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