September is when the CPD year quietly restarts. Members come back from the summer, look at their record, and work out how far behind they are.
It’s also when I get a particular kind of email. Not from the education director — from a member, forwarded on by the education director, asking whether the association can send them “something official” for a course they completed eighteen months ago. The certificate went to an old work address. Or it downloaded once and was never seen again. Or it exists, and it doesn’t say what the regulator wants it to say.
That last one is the interesting problem, because it’s the one nobody knows they have.
Your learning management system was almost certainly built to deliver learning and record completion. Those are the things a platform is good at. But completion is not the thing your member is judged on. What they’re judged on is evidence — and a certificate that says “Advanced Wound Care — completed 14 March 2025” is not evidence of very much at all.
Two regulators, two entirely different demands
Here’s what makes this harder than it looks. If your membership spans nursing and the allied health professions — and most healthcare associations’ does — you are serving two regulators who want opposite things.
The NMC counts hours. For revalidation, a nurse, midwife or nursing associate needs 35 hours of CPD across the three-year period since their registration was last renewed. The NMC also specifies exactly what a CPD record has to contain: the CPD method, a description of the topic and how it related to practice, the dates the activity was undertaken, the number of hours (including the number of participatory hours), the part of the Code most relevant to the activity, and evidence that the activity was undertaken. Six fields. Most certificates carry two of them.
The HCPC counts nothing. The HCPC explicitly does not set a number of hours or points, and does not approve or endorse CPD activities. It has five standards instead, and it is interested in outcomes — what you learnt and how it changed your practice. At the start of each renewal it randomly selects 2.5 per cent of each profession and asks them to submit a CPD profile.
So the same course, taken by two of your members, needs to produce a defensible number of hours for one of them and a defensible account of changed practice for the other. Most LMS certificates do neither.
The participatory problem
This is the part I’d like every education director to go and check this week, because it’s specific and it’s checkable in about ten minutes.
Of the NMC’s 35 hours, at least 20 must be participatory learning. The NMC defines that as activity involving interaction with one or more other professionals — physical or virtual, so you don’t have to be in the same room. Attending a conference counts. A workshop counts. A group discussion counts.
A self-paced e-learning module, taken alone at eleven at night, does not.
Now go and look at your course catalogue. If your entire online CPD offer is on-demand modules — and for a great many associations it is, because on-demand is the easiest thing to build and the easiest thing to sell — then your members can only ever use your platform for 15 of their 35 hours. The other 20 they have to get somewhere else.
That is a strategic fact about your education programme dressed up as a technical detail. It also cuts the other way: if you run webinars with live Q&A, journal clubs, case discussion groups, or a members’ forum where clinical questions get debated, you are already producing participatory learning and you are very probably not saying so anywhere on the certificate.
The HCPC has its own version of the same trap. Standard 2 requires a mixture of learning activities — at least two different types. The HCPC is direct about the consequence: a registrant who had only read professional journals, and done nothing else, would not meet the standard. If your association is a member’s only source of CPD and you only offer one format, you are not helping them as much as you think.
What actually belongs on a certificate
Not a wish list. This is the minimum that lets a member use your course as evidence without having to reconstruct anything from memory two years later.
The course title, and what it was about. One sentence describing the topic, not just the title. The NMC record needs a description of the topic and how it related to practice; the member writes the practice part, but you can give them the topic part.
The date, and the date range if it applies. A course completed over six weeks is not the same as one completed in an afternoon, and the record asks for the dates the activity was undertaken.
Hours — stated honestly, and split. How many hours of learning, and how many of those were participatory. If none were participatory, say so. A certificate that says “3 hours (0 participatory)” is more useful to a nurse than one that says nothing, because it tells them what they still need. Resist the urge to inflate this. Someone will eventually check.
Learning outcomes. Three or four lines of what the course covered. This is what a member reaches for when they have to write about what they learnt and can’t remember the detail.
The accrediting body and reference number, if you have one. And if you don’t, don’t imply that you do.
A verification URL that still resolves in three years. This is the one that gets missed. A PDF sitting in someone’s downloads folder proves nothing on its own. A short link that resolves to a page confirming “this person completed this course on this date” is what makes it verifiable — and it needs to survive your next website change. Which means it must not be tied to a plugin you might replace.
The member’s name, spelled the way it’s spelled on the register. Sounds trivial. Isn’t, when someone is submitting it to a regulator.
The transcript is more useful than the certificate
Most LMSs produce one PDF per course. That’s the wrong unit.
What a member actually needs, when they sit down to do their revalidation, is a single record of everything they’ve done with you — every course, with dates, hours, participatory split and outcomes, in one downloadable document they can attach or paste from.
This is almost always a reporting job rather than a platform job. The data is already in your LMS. It’s sitting in the completions table. What’s missing is a page in the member’s account that says “your learning record” and a button that produces it.
If you build one thing out of this article, build that.
Reflection, built in where the learning happens
The HCPC wants to know what changed as a result of the activity. The NMC’s written reflective accounts ask registrants to connect CPD to the Code. Both of those are things a member has to write, and both are things a member writes much better in the ten minutes after finishing a course than eighteen months later.
Three questions at the end of the module. What’s one thing you’ll do differently? Who benefits from that? Which part of your professional standards does it relate to? Stored against the member’s record, editable later, included in the transcript.
It is a small piece of development work and it turns your LMS from a delivery system into a record system. It also, incidentally, gives you the most interesting data your education programme will ever collect about whether your courses actually change anything.
What to ask your LMS supplier
Paste this into an email. The answers will tell you a great deal, including how much of this is configuration you already own.
- Can we add custom fields to the certificate template — learning hours, participatory hours, learning outcomes, accreditation reference?
- Can a member download a single transcript covering all their completed courses, or only one certificate at a time?
- Does each certificate have a permanent verification URL, and what happens to those URLs if we change our website?
- Can we add questions at the end of a course whose answers are stored against the member’s record and appear in their transcript?
- Can we report on completions by member across a date range they choose, rather than a fixed period?
- Which of the above are included in our current plan, and which are chargeable?
Question six matters more than it looks. A surprising amount of this turns out to be available and switched off.
The awkward part
If your LMS can’t do most of this, that is not automatically a reason to replace it.
I say this knowing that “you need a new platform” is the more profitable answer, and it’s the one you’ll hear elsewhere. But replacing an LMS is a year of work, a migration risk to every historical completion record you hold, and a real chance that the new system is differently limited rather than better. Most of what I’ve described here is a certificate template, a report and a small form. That is weeks, not a year.
There are genuine reasons to move — if your platform can’t be extended at all, if the supplier has stopped developing it, if you can’t get your own data out of it. Not being able to print hours on a certificate today is not one of them. Ask what it would take to fix first. Ask about a rebuild second.
This is the same argument I make about websites generally, and it holds here: most systems don’t need replacing, they need someone to look after them properly.
Where to start
Open your own LMS this week and download a certificate for one of your own courses, as a member would receive it. Read it as though you were about to send it to the NMC.
That will tell you within about two minutes whether you have a problem worth solving.
If you’d like a second opinion on the whole picture — your LMS, your member area and the site around them — our Website Check-Up is £400 and covers the technical condition of your site, accessibility and compliance, sustainability, usability, and what AI assistants currently say about your organisation. You’ll have the report within 48 hours of giving us access, usually within 24, and if you go on to work with us we deduct the £400 from that work.
If the certificate and transcript work is what you want done rather than reviewed, that’s the sort of thing our Website Care Plan exists for — it starts from £400 a month, there’s no minimum contract, and unused hours roll over for up to twelve months, so you can save them towards a piece of work like this.
Or just book a call and tell me what your LMS does. No charge, no pitch.
Related reading
- What to Look for in a Learning Management System for a Healthcare Association
- Empowering Healthcare Professionals: The Rise of Microlearning for Continuous Professional Development
- A New Private Professional Network for Obesity Canada Boosts Course Sign-Ups
Sources
- Nursing and Midwifery Council, Continuing professional development — 35 hours over three years, at least 20 participatory, and the six required record fields
- Nursing and Midwifery Council, Written reflective accounts
- Health and Care Professions Council, Our CPD requirements — the five standards, no set hours, mixture of at least two activity types
- Health and Care Professions Council, The CPD audit process — 2.5 per cent of each profession randomly selected at each renewal
All figures checked against the regulators’ own pages on 28 August 2026. Requirements differ for other regulators — the GMC, GPhC and GDC each set their own — so check your own membership’s mix before quoting numbers to them.
