Operating Department Practitioner CPD and the HCPC Audit

If you are an operating department practitioner registered with the HCPC, your renewal window is open now. It opened on 1 September 2026 and the deadline is 30 November 2026. If you have been registered for two years or more, there is a one-in-forty chance you have also been selected for CPD audit, and the profile deadline is the same date as the renewal deadline.

What the HCPC actually requires

Start with what it does not require. The HCPC states plainly that it does not set a number of hours or points you have to complete, and that it does not approve or endorse any CPD activities. Anyone quoting you an hours target for HCPC CPD is inventing it.

What exists instead is five standards. Registrants must:

• maintain a continuous, up-to-date and accurate record of their CPD activities
• demonstrate that their CPD activities are a mixture of learning activities relevant to current or future practice
• seek to ensure that their CPD has contributed to the quality of their practice and service delivery
• seek to ensure that their CPD benefits the service user
• upon request, present a written profile, which must be their own work and supported by evidence, explaining how they have met the standards for CPD

The only number anywhere in the standards sits inside the second one: a mixture of activities means at least two different types of learning activity. Two types, not two activities. A year of nothing but mandatory e-learning does not satisfy it however many modules you complete.

The audit, and the odds

At the start of each renewal the HCPC randomly selects 2.5 per cent of each profession and asks them to submit a CPD profile. Selection is computer-generated, only registrants of two years or more are eligible, and being picked once does not exempt you — the HCPC is explicit that you could be selected on multiple occasions.

You are notified by email at the start of your renewal window, with a message in your online account. You have approximately three months to complete and submit, and a reminder lands roughly a month before the deadline. If you do not send a profile, or any information requested as part of the audit, the HCPC may remove you from the register.

One reassuring detail about who reads it: CPD assessors are registrants the HCPC appoints and trains, and at least one of the assessors on your profile will be from your own profession. An operating department practitioner's profile is not assessed solely by someone who has never been in theatre.

How operating department practitioners have actually performed

The HCPC publishes audit outcomes by profession. For the 2020 to 2022 cycle:

Read that honestly and it is reassuring rather than alarming. Three removals out of 336. But the deferral rate is the figure worth sitting with: nearly one in six selected practitioners asked to defer rather than submit. Deferral is granted for unavoidable circumstances and the HCPC accepted those requests — but a sixth of a profession needing to postpone suggests a lot of people are assembling the profile at the point of being asked rather than keeping it as they go.

That is the difference between the first standard and the fifth. The first requires a continuous record. The fifth only asks you to produce a profile on request. If you treat the fifth as the real obligation, you end up writing two years of CPD from memory in a three-month window.

What the profile has to contain

The profile covers the activities you have undertaken since your last renewal, with supporting evidence. The detail most people miss: the evidence should include a dated list, specifically so assessors can identify any gaps of more than three consecutive months that have not been accounted for.

That tells you exactly how the profile is read. Assessors are looking for continuity, not volume. A quiet quarter is not a problem if it is explained — parental leave, sickness, a secondment — but an unexplained three-month hole is the thing the dated list is designed to surface. Our guide to preparing an HCPC CPD profile and what to submit goes through the structure in detail.

What counts for an ODP specifically

The standards are deliberately broad, and the HCPC describes its approach as flexible enough to take account of the range of professionals it registers. For operating department practitioners that breadth is useful, because the obvious theatre-based learning is only part of what is available.

Mandatory and statutory training your employer already requires counts. So does anything that evidences the second standard's mixture: a case review discussed in team debrief, reading around a new technique or device, supervising a student, a quality improvement project, an incident investigation you contributed to. The test is not where the learning happened but whether you can show it changed your practice and benefited the service user — standards three and four — which is why a reflective line on each entry matters more than the certificate attached to it.

If you are reading this in November 2026

The deadline is 30 November. If you have been selected, submit rather than defer where you reasonably can, because a deferral is a postponement of the same task rather than a release from it. If you have not been selected, this renewal is the moment to start the continuous record that standard one actually asks for, so that the next cycle is a matter of exporting rather than reconstructing.

Renewal windows run on a two-year cycle staggered across the professions, so your next one follows in 2028. Confirm the exact dates on the HCPC's own renewals page before you plan around them — the page carrying the table has an inconsistent update stamp, and dates are the one thing worth checking at source.

For comparison, the equivalent requirements and audit figures for paramedics and for occupational therapists follow the same five standards on different renewal windows.