Medical Radiation Practice CPD: 60 Hours Across a Triennium

Most Australian National Boards ask registrants to complete a set number of continuing professional development hours each registration year. The Medical Radiation Practice Board does not. Its requirement runs across a three-year block, and the way the hours have to be distributed inside that block is the part practitioners most often miss.

Sixty hours across a triennium, not twenty a year

The requirement is 60 hours of CPD over a three-year CPD period. The current period runs from 1 December 2024 to 30 November 2027. Sixty hours divided by three years looks like 20 hours annually, and in practice many practitioners do spread it that way, but the standard does not express it as an annual figure and a practitioner is not non-compliant for having an uneven year.

What the standard does impose is a floor. At least 10 hours must fall in any one year of the period. A practitioner cannot complete 60 hours in the final 12 months and treat the first two years as empty. Nor can they front-load everything into year one and coast. The floor is low enough to allow a genuinely quiet year and high enough to prevent the whole obligation collapsing into a single scramble before the period closes.

The 35-hour substantive sub-quota

Of the 60 hours, at least 35 must be substantive CPD. That is the sub-quota that determines what a practitioner can actually buy and count. The remaining 25 hours can be made up of the broader range of professional development the standard recognises, but the substantive share is more than half the total and cannot be filled with the easier material.

For anyone commissioning training for a medical radiation workforce, the planning unit is therefore not "60 hours over three years" but two separate running totals that both have to clear: 35 substantive hours, and 25 others, with a 10-hour annual floor sitting across both. A catalogue that reports only a total hour count does not give an employer enough information to know whether its staff are on track.

No retention period is stated

The Board's published material does not set a period for which CPD records must be kept. That is an absence rather than a permission. A practitioner selected for audit still has to produce evidence for the period under review, and because the period itself is three years long, the practical retention expectation is at least the length of the current triennium plus whatever time an audit takes to conclude.

Other regulators handle this very differently, and the range is wider than most practitioners assume. Some set a rule in years, some count in cycles, and at least one states explicitly that it specifies no period at all. Our comparison of CPD record retention periods across UK regulators sets the spread out side by side, and the pattern it shows applies here too: a stated absence and an unstated absence are not the same thing, and neither removes the need to hold evidence.

Why the Australian boards cannot be compared on a single number

The medical radiation requirement is a good illustration of a problem that runs through the whole national scheme. Of the 15 National Boards, almost all publish a headline CPD figure, and almost none of those figures are measured the same way. Medical radiation practice counts hours over three years with a substantive sub-quota and an annual floor. Nursing and midwifery counts hours per registration year, with the total changing where a registrant holds dual registration or an endorsement, as set out in our guide to NMBA CPD hours, dual registration and endorsements. Pharmacy does not count hours at all, but weighted credits, so that its apparently larger total can represent far less time, as explained in our guide to why 40 Pharmacy Board credits is not 40 hours.

Put 60, 20 and 40 in the same column of a table and the table is wrong even though every figure in it is right. The comparison only works once the period, the sub-quotas and the unit of measurement travel with each number.

What the period end date does to demand

Because the obligation is set over three years rather than annually, the pressure point is the end of the period rather than the end of each registration year. The current triennium closes on 30 November 2027. A practitioner who has cleared the 10-hour annual floor each year but has not been tracking the substantive share separately can arrive at that date needing a large block of substantive hours in a short window. Employers planning training budgets should expect the demand curve to steepen toward the close of a period rather than repeat evenly across the three years.

The annual floor is what makes this manageable rather than inevitable. A practitioner who records the substantive and the non-substantive totals as two separate running figures from the start of the period will know two years out whether the 35-hour share is on track. Tracking a single combined total of 60 hides precisely the shortfall that is hardest to correct late, because substantive activity is the harder of the two to source at short notice.

One currency warning

A joint consultation on revised CPD registration standards across the National Boards closed on 17 July 2026. The totals, the sub-quota and the structure of the CPD period could all change as a result. Before relying on any figure here for a compliance decision, check the current published standard on the Medical Radiation Practice Board's registration standards page.