The Medical Council’s 2025 CPD framework puts a strong emphasis on reflective practice. Learn how the new mandatory Professional Development Plan (PDP) and other changes encourage Irish doctors to reflect on their practice as part of their CPD.
Reflective Practice: A Cornerstone of the New Framework
One of the most significant shifts in the Medical Council’s updated 2025 Maintenance of Professional Competence framework is the greater emphasis on reflective practice in doctors’ continuing professional development. The revised framework was designed to incorporate “greater emphasis on reflective CPD activities”. In practical terms, this means doctors are now expected not just to attend lectures or conferences for CPD credit, but also to regularly reflect on their own practice – what they are doing, what they could improve, and what they need to learn.
Reflective practice is woven throughout the new CPD requirements. Doctors are required to complete a Professional Development Plan (PDP) each year, and to undertake a practice review (audit or quality improvement project) as part of their CPD. These components force a degree of self-evaluation: you must think about your learning needs, set goals, and analyze your outcomes. This is a deliberate move away from a tick-the-box approach and toward a more thoughtful, self-directed form of professional development.
Why the focus on reflection? Studies and international best practices have shown that when professionals actively reflect on their experiences, it leads to deeper learning and improvements in practice. By critiquing your own cases and decisions, you can identify strengths, recognize areas for improvement, and ultimately provide better patient care. The Medical Council’s new rules aim to embed this habit of reflection into the yearly CPD cycle for every doctor in Ireland.
The Mandatory PDP: Planning Through Reflection
Under the new framework, the Professional Development Plan (PDP) has become a centerpiece of reflective CPD. Every doctor must now create a PDP at the start of the scheme year, outlining their learning objectives and planned activities. According to the Medical Council, “a PDP is a useful tool for doctors to reflect and capture their CPD needs and objectives for the coming scheme year”. In other words, the PDP process asks you to take stock of your professional strengths and weaknesses and plan your education accordingly.
This exercise is inherently reflective. You might ask yourself: What skills do I need to improve? What new medical developments should I learn about? How can I better address patient needs or feedback? By writing down these goals and plotting how to achieve them, you are engaging in structured self-reflection on your practice and learning needs.
Importantly, the Medical Council emphasizes that the PDP is for your own development, not an exam or assessment. “PDPs are a tool for professional development and not for performance management”, the guidance notes. You won’t be “graded” on your PDP; its purpose is to help you think critically about your growth as a practitioner. Doctors are expected to update their PDP throughout the year and again when planning the next year’s goals. This ensures a continuous cycle of setting targets, working toward them, then reviewing and adjusting – the essence of reflective learning.
Another facet of the PDP is that it encourages doctors to consider the Eight Domains of Good Professional Practice in their plans. This means reflecting not only on medical knowledge or technical skills, but also on areas like communication, professionalism, management and leadership, patient advocacy, etc. By doing so, the PDP helps doctors maintain a well-rounded competence and not neglect any key professional qualities.
Work-Based Learning: Reflection in Everyday Practice
Beyond the PDP, the new Work-Based Learning (WBL) category is another pillar of the reflective approach. Work-based learning is essentially about learning through your day-to-day work activities, by reflecting on those experiences. The Medical Council describes WBL as involving doctors’ “reflection of their clinical and non-clinical work”, where you “analyse and assess areas of [your] professional practice to gain insight on best practice and improvements where possible”. This category intentionally prompts doctors to turn daily practice into learning opportunities.
For example, after a complex case or a critical incident at the hospital, a doctor might take time to debrief, perhaps discussing with colleagues what went well and what could be improved. That debrief and analysis is work-based learning. Similarly, participating in a morbidity and mortality meeting, where you review cases and outcomes, is counted as work-based learning – it’s a reflective exercise aimed at improving future practice. Even reading up on a challenging case or seeking feedback from peers can fall under this category, as long as you are actively processing and applying those lessons to your work.
Work-based learning “aims to make an individual more aware of their own professional knowledge and action by challenging assumptions of everyday practice and critically evaluating their own responses to practice situations”. In simpler terms, the new framework wants doctors to question, “Why do I do things this way? Is there a better approach?” on a regular basis. By critically evaluating one’s routine practices, doctors can uncover blind spots and keep improving continuously, rather than only learning during formal courses.
Audits and Practice Reviews: Learning from Quality Improvement
Even the practice review component (formerly the annual clinical audit) has reflection at its core. Conducting an audit or quality improvement project requires a doctor to review their own outcomes against standards, identify gaps, and implement changes – it’s a structured reflection on practice performance. The new framework broadened this concept to include not just traditional audits, but any project that “reviews and enhances practice”. This could mean a clinical audit, but it might also be a patient feedback analysis, a peer review of one’s clinical decisions, or a systems improvement project in your clinic.
By requiring a practice review each year for practising doctors, the Medical Council ensures that at least once a year you take a deep dive into some aspect of your work and learn from it. It’s an opportunity to reflect on questions like: Are we meeting the standards of care? What are the outcomes for my patients with condition X, and how can they be improved? The insight gained and the changes made from these activities are a direct result of reflective analysis, closing the loop between learning and practice change.
Fostering a Reflective Culture
Overall, the 2025 CPD updates push Irish doctors towards a more reflective culture of continuous improvement. Instead of just accumulating points, doctors are expected to think about what they’re learning and why. The reflective practice elements – PDPs, work-based learning activities, and practice reviews – work together to make CPD a more personalized and meaningful process. Doctors have more autonomy to choose learning activities that fit their practice and more incentive to regularly pause and consider how they can grow.
For practitioners, embracing this reflective approach can be very rewarding. It transforms CPD from a checkbox chore into a valuable exercise that directly feeds back into better patient care and professional satisfaction. By regularly reviewing your own performance and planning your development, you’re likely to stay more engaged with learning and better equipped to adapt to new developments in medicine.
In summary, the new MPC framework recognizes that the best learning comes from thoughtful practice. The mandatory PDP ensures every doctor starts the year with a reflective plan. Work-based learning credits all those informal moments of insight on the job. And the practice review requirement closes the loop by turning reflections into tangible improvements. Together, these changes place reflective practice front and center – ultimately helping doctors become lifelong learners and reflective practitioners.
