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CPD you can evidence without writing it up twice
The CPD is rarely the problem. You go to the webinar, read the paper, sit in supervision, work through the complicated patient who taught you something. The learning happens.
The writing-up is what gets deferred — until a folder of certificates and a vague intention to reflect meet a deadline, and an evening disappears reconstructing a year you can only half remember.
That evening is avoidable, but not by writing faster. It goes away when the writing moves to where it costs two minutes instead of two hours.
1. Know whose requirement it is
Australian dietitians are Accredited Practising Dietitians, credentialled by Dietitians Australia. You are not registered with AHPRA, and AHPRA registration is not a requirement to practise as a dietitian here. If an employer form asks you for an AHPRA number, the form is wrong, not you — more on that on our about page.
So your CPD obligation sits with your professional association, not a registration board, and the current requirement should be read at the source. The hours, the cycle length and the activity categories are Dietitians Australia’s to set, and they are revised from time to time. A figure repeated on a software company’s blog is the sort of thing that goes quietly out of date, so we are not going to print one.
What is stable is the shape of the evidence: what you did, when, how long it took, what you took from it, and how it connects to your practice. The last two are what people skip, and the difference between a list of attendance and a portfolio.
2. Treat the reflection as perishable
An activity log can be reconstructed months later. A reflection cannot.
Within a week of a difficult consultation you still remember what you were unsure about, what you tried, and the moment you realised you had misread the situation. By June you remember that it happened.
So the discipline is not “do more reflection” — it is “write it while it is still recoverable”. Three honest sentences on the day beat a polished paragraph invented in retrospect.
3. Log the activity in the two minutes after it ends
The activity record is the cheap half: a title, a date, a category, the hours, and a line about what you got out of it. Done as the webinar closes, that costs about the time it takes to make a coffee. Done in bulk at the end of a cycle it costs an evening and produces worse entries, because “what I took from it” degrades into “attended”.
Our CPD hub records those fields — title, category, hours, date, the setting, a description, a supervisor if one was involved, and your learning points. Entries are private to you by default; you can choose to share one with your organisation.
4. Use a template so the blank box is not blank
Most people who avoid reflective writing are not avoiding reflection. They are avoiding an empty text box with no prompt in it. Structure fixes that, and the hub offers three templates: Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, which walks you through description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action plan; STAR — situation, task, action, result — which is faster and suits competency-style evidence; and free-form.
Gibbs gets deeper. STAR fits in the gap between patients. Pick per occasion.
5. Supervision already generates a record — use it
If you are in supervision or mentoring, you generate CPD evidence every session — the kind that is hard to fake and easy to lose. In the hub, supervision and mentorship run as a partnership between two accounts: a contract both parties draft and sign, then a session log with the date, duration, topics, notes and action items. Group cohorts work the same way, and mentorship sessions can be counter-signed.
If you are the supervisor, that is CPD too — supervising and mentoring is one of the activity categories, and it is routinely under-logged by the people doing it.
6. Rate yourself, then let the gaps pick next year’s CPD
The hub includes a competency self-assessment: nine domains, from professionalism and communication through to leadership, with thirty-two competencies underneath them. You rate each on a five-point scale from not rated through to proficient, and you can add your own.
Done once, it is a snapshot. Done twice a year apart, it is evidence of development — and the low ratings are a ready-made list of what to learn next.
That is also the order to work in. Retrofitting a learning goal onto a conference you already attended is transparent; writing the goal first makes the activity obvious. The hub holds SMART goals and CPD hours targets with a due date and a running current-versus-target figure.
7. What the hub does not do
Being precise, because the gap matters if you are relying on this.
There is no export. You cannot download your CPD log as a PDF or a spreadsheet. You can filter entries by category and date range on screen and read the running totals — hours this calendar year, entries this month, competencies rated, active goals — but if your association asks for a portfolio, you are copying it out by hand. An export is on the list, not built.
It also does not know your requirement: it will not tell you how many hours you still owe, it does not track your cycle, and it does not remind you. It counts what you put in, against targets you set yourself.
And nothing in it is verified. It is your self-reported record, the same as a spreadsheet — one that happens to live next to the work and prompt you properly.
That is the whole claim: it does not make the evidence for you, it removes the reason to defer writing it. The same logic runs through the platform — where the hours actually go, the admin to sort before your first private client, the full feature list and the CPD and learning page.
References
- Dietitians Australia, maintaining professional standards — the current CPD requirement, cycle and activity categories for APDs.
- Dietitians Australia, National Competency Standards for Dietitians — the framework self-assessment is usually mapped against.
General information about professional-development record-keeping for Australian dietitians. It is not advice on your credentialling obligations. Confirm the current CPD requirements, cycle and evidence standards directly with Dietitians Australia — they are set by the association and they change.