HCPC CPD for operating department practitioners: your 2026 renewal and how reflection fits

If you are an operating department practitioner, your HCPC renewal window opens on 1 September 2026 and closes on 30 November 2026. That is the point at which a random sample of the profession will also be asked to submit a CPD profile. This article covers what the CPD standards actually require, what the profile contains, and how to turn theatre practice into writing that satisfies an assessor.

Your renewal window and the audit

HCPC registration is renewed every two years, and each profession renews at a set time that stays the same every cycle. For operating department practitioners the window opens on 1 September 2026 and the deadline is 30 November 2026. Renewal itself is straightforward: you log into your online account, make your professional declaration and pay your fee.

The part that causes anxiety is the audit. Each time a profession renews, the HCPC asks a random sample of 2.5 per cent of registrants to submit a CPD profile. Only registrants who have been registered for two years or more are audited, and those selected are given around three months to complete and send their profile. Once submitted, the HCPC estimates an average processing time of eight to twelve weeks.

Being selected is not a concern in itself. It becomes a problem only when a registrant has done plenty of learning and recorded almost none of it.

The five CPD standards, in plain terms

The standards of continuing professional development require registrants to:

1. Maintain a continuous, up to date and accurate record of their CPD activities.
2. Demonstrate that their CPD activities are a mixture of learning activities relevant to current or future practice.
3. Seek to ensure that their CPD has contributed to the quality of their practice and service delivery.
4. Seek to ensure that their CPD benefits the service user.
5. Upon request, present a written profile, which must be their own work and supported by evidence, explaining how they have met the standards.

Two points are worth pausing on. First, there is no set number of CPD hours. The HCPC does not count hours, it looks for a mixture of at least two different types of learning that is relevant to your scope of practice. Second, standard 5 says the profile must be your own work. A profile written by someone else, or one that reuses text from another registrant's profile, does not meet the standard, and the HCPC has said it would stop the assessment and investigate the matter through its fitness to practise process.

What counts as CPD across the three phases

ODP practice spans the anaesthetic, surgical and post-anaesthetic phases, and your CPD record should look like it. Assessors are looking for relevance to your actual scope, not a generic list of mandatory training. Activities that commonly count include:

• Anaesthetic phase: difficult airway drills, rapid sequence induction refreshers, updates on new airway devices, malignant hyperthermia simulation.
• Surgical phase: scrub practice for a new specialty or list type, training on new instrumentation or robotic systems, count and swab safety updates.
• Post-anaesthetic phase: recovery competency updates, handover standards, recognition of emergence delirium or post-operative deterioration.
• Across all phases: human factors and teamwork training, WHO surgical safety checklist audits, mortality and morbidity meetings, mentoring students, peer discussion, journal reading, sustainability and procurement work in theatres.

The list is not the hard part. The hard part is standards 3 and 4, which ask what changed in your practice as a result, and who benefited. Attendance alone does not meet those standards. A certificate proves you were in the room. It does not prove you learned anything.

The four parts of the CPD profile

If you are selected, the profile has four sections:

1. A summary of your recent work or practice, up to 500 words. Describe your role, your main responsibilities, the specialist areas you work in and who you work with. Your job description is a reasonable starting point.
2. A dated list of your CPD activities since you last renewed. If you have a gap of three or more consecutive months, explain why in your statement.
3. A personal statement, maximum 1,500 words, concentrating on standards 3 and 4.
4. Supporting evidence for the activities you actually discussed in the statement. You do not need to upload your entire folder, only the evidence behind what you wrote about.

Reflection is what carries the personal statement

The HCPC suggests picking a number of CPD activities from the last two years and explaining, for each one, what you did, what you learned, what you now do differently, and who has benefited. That is a reflective structure, whether or not you call it one. Four beats, per activity, is usually enough:

I attended a half day human factors session on speaking up in theatre. The part that stayed with me was the evidence that concerns are often raised too softly to be heard under noise and time pressure, and the graded assertiveness phrasing offered as a fix. A few weeks later, on an emergency list, the swab count was interrupted twice by staff moving in and out of the room. Previously I would have carried on and hoped the numbers reconciled. Instead I said clearly that I was not happy to proceed and asked for the count to be repeated with the room quiet. A discrepancy was found and resolved before closure. I now routinely ask for the room to settle before any count, and two colleagues on my list have started doing the same. The benefit to the patient is obvious, and the benefit to the team is that the count is no longer treated as background noise.

That is roughly 160 words and it clears standards 2, 3 and 4 on its own. Three or four paragraphs like it, plus your evidence, is a profile.

Anonymising your examples

Nothing in your profile should identify a patient or a colleague. Use roles rather than names. Leave out dates, list numbers, theatre numbers and anything else that could locate the episode. Say "a patient undergoing emergency abdominal surgery", not the operation, the day and the surgeon. If removing the detail makes the example unrecognisable to you, you have probably removed the right amount. The learning is the point, not the case.

If the event was a hard one

Theatre generates events that stay with people. A cardiac arrest on the table, a never event, a difficult airway that went badly. Reflecting on these can be genuinely useful, but there is a line between reflection and rumination. Reflection moves forward: it asks what you learned and what you would do differently. Rumination circles the same moment and adds nothing. If writing about an event leaves you feeling worse each time you return to it, that is a signal to stop writing and talk to someone. Your occupational health service and your union are both there for this. Samaritans can be reached free on 116 123 at any time.

A plan between now and 30 November

1. Log into your online account and check your contact details are current, because that is how the renewal and any audit notice will reach you.
2. Build the dated list now, working backwards from your last renewal. It is far easier to reconstruct in July than in November.
3. Choose three or four activities that genuinely changed something about how you practise.
4. Write one paragraph on each, following the four beats: what you did, what you learned, what you changed, who benefited.
5. Gather the evidence that sits behind those specific activities.
6. Renew early in the window rather than in the last fortnight.

If you have the learning but the writing is the bottleneck, that is what Reflectory is for. It interviews you about the event, question by question, and produces a reflective account in your own words, with identifiable details screened out and an AI-assistance disclosure built into the document. You remain the author, which is exactly what standard 5 requires.