CORU CPD for Podiatrists and Chiropodists: The Newest Register, and Why the Standards of Proficiency Are Not the Obligation

The Podiatrists Registration Board maintains one of the newest and smallest registers CORU operates. Around 532 practitioners are on it. That combination — a young register and a small population — produces a particular kind of confusion about what the continuing professional development obligation for podiatrists and chiropodists in Ireland actually is, and which document creates it.

The confusion is understandable, because the document most podiatrists are pointed towards when they ask what competence is expected of them says, in terms, that it is not the answer to that question.

The timeline that still catches people out

The register for podiatrists opened on 31 March 2021. Both "podiatrist" and "chiropodist" are protected titles under the Health and Social Care Professionals Act 2005, and that protection took effect on 31 March 2023 at the end of the two-year transitional period. Since that date, using either title without being registered is an offence, and the two words are treated as naming the same regulated profession rather than two tiers of practitioner.

Practitioners who registered during the transitional window are therefore in their second full statutory cycle, not their first. The ongoing CPD obligation did not begin when someone personally started paying attention to it; it began when their registration did.

What the Standards of Proficiency are, and what they are not

The Standards of Proficiency for Podiatrists set out five domains:

• Professional Autonomy and Accountability
• Communication, Collaborative Practice and Teamworking
• Safety and Quality
• Professional Development
• Professional Knowledge and Skills

Domain 4, Professional Development, is the one that reads most like a CPD rule. Its indicators require a registrant to be able to engage in and take responsibility for professional development; to understand the need to demonstrate evidence of ongoing continuing professional development and education; to be able to evaluate and reflect critically on their own professional practice to identify learning and development needs; and to understand the importance of seeking professional development, supervision and feedback. Domain 1 sits underneath it, requiring practice within the legal, ethical and practice boundaries of the profession and the ability to identify the limits of one's own practice and know when to seek advice. Domain 5 carries the clinical specifics, including skills in evidence-informed practice and the conduct of neurological, vascular, biomechanical, dermatological and podiatric assessments.

Read as a list, that looks like the obligation. It is not. The Standards of Proficiency are threshold standards for entry to the register, and the document states plainly that they "are not standards for practice after entry to the register." They describe what a graduate or an international applicant must be able to do in order to be registered at all. They are the gate, not the road.

This distinction matters in a practical way. A podiatrist who builds a CPD portfolio by mapping activities against the five domains has produced a document that answers an entry question using post-entry evidence. It is not worthless — the domains are a reasonable taxonomy of professional competence — but it is not what the regulator asks for at audit, and it will not by itself demonstrate compliance.

Where the ongoing obligation actually comes from

Two instruments carry it. The first is the Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics for podiatrists, given effect by S.I. No. 64 of 2021, which obliges registrants to maintain and develop their professional competence throughout their working lives. The second is CORU's CPD framework, which quantifies that duty at 30 credits per annum, split between formal and informal learning, recorded contemporaneously and supported by reflection.

The framework is the measurable part and the Code is the enforceable part. A registrant who has the credits but no reflective record has satisfied an arithmetic test and not an ethical one. A registrant who has reflected extensively but cannot produce a credit total has the opposite problem. Audits examine both, and the separation between the two sources is why. Our guide to CORU CPD requirements across the allied health professions sets out how the framework applies in common to all twelve boards.

The audit has already happened

This is the point most likely to be missed. CORU's audit date for podiatrists was 1 April 2026, examining the period from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2026. That window has closed. Anyone constructing a portfolio now is constructing it for the cycle that is currently running, not the one that has just been assessed.

The audit schedule is published in advance for all of CORU's boards, and the next tranche — covering dietitians, radiographers and speech and language therapists — falls due in November 2026, as we set out in our note on the November 2026 CORU audit dates. Podiatrists are not in that tranche, which is precisely why the cycle now underway is the one that deserves attention.

What a small register means for the odds

CORU's published audits sample rather than examine everyone. The radiographers audit drew a five per cent sample from 958 eligible registrants. If a comparable sampling rate were applied to a register of 532, the sample would be in the region of twenty-five to thirty practitioners.

That is a small absolute number, and it is tempting to read it as a low individual risk. The more useful reading is the opposite. On a small register, a sample of thirty is a meaningful proportion of the professional community, the regulator has the capacity to look closely at each portfolio rather than triage at volume, and the findings that emerge are identifiable in a way they are not in a profession of several thousand. Small registers are not lightly audited; they are the ones where an audit can actually be thorough.

What the published findings say goes wrong

CORU has published a trend report on the radiographers audit, and it is the best available evidence of what the regulator finds when it looks. Forty-four per cent of those audited met the recording standards on first submission, and 137 items remained outstanding after the first round. The profession differs but the failure modes do not: activities logged without reflection, credits claimed without evidence of attendance or completion, and portfolios assembled retrospectively from memory rather than maintained as the year went along. We examined the detail in our analysis of the CORU radiographers trend report.

A majority failing at first submission is not a sign that the standard is unreasonable. It is a sign that contemporaneous recording is the single variable that separates a portfolio that passes from one that requires a second round, and that most practitioners discover this at audit rather than before it.

No accredited providers, and why that is the harder regime

CORU does not accredit CPD providers. There is no approved list, no provider seal, and no course that is compliant by virtue of who ran it. The registrant decides whether an activity is relevant to their scope of practice and defends that judgement at audit.

Practitioners sometimes read this as a lighter regime than one with an approved-provider list. It is the reverse. Compare the Veterinary Council of Ireland's CPD requirements, where activities must be VCI-accredited to count: the obligation there is to pick from a list, and the regulator has pre-answered the relevance question. Under CORU, nobody has answered it for you. The accreditation-free model transfers the burden of justification from the provider to the individual, which is more work, not less.

The same architecture applies across the CORU boards, and the practical detail is close enough that the guidance transfers — see our guides to CPD for occupational therapists and CPD for physiotherapists, both of which cover the same framework from a profession with a longer audit history.

Our suggestions

Three things follow for a podiatrist or chiropodist working in Ireland now.

Record as you go, in the cycle that is running. The 2026 audit window is closed and the current one is open; a portfolio built in the month before a notice arrives is the pattern the trend report identifies as failing. Second, write the reflection at the time, not later. The credit total is the easy part to reconstruct and the reflective note is the part that cannot be reconstructed honestly. Third, stop mapping to the Standards of Proficiency. Map to the Code's competence duty and the 30-credit framework, and keep the Standards for what they are — the entry threshold you have already cleared.

Podiatry in Ireland also runs across settings where scope-of-practice questions arise directly, including residential care, which we covered separately in our guide to podiatry and chiropody access in care homes. CPD records that reflect the settings someone actually works in are easier to defend than records that reflect the courses that happened to be available.