Pakistan CPD for Nurses and Doctors: What Is Required

Pakistan publishes no continuing professional development requirement for nurses, and none that can be verified for doctors. In both cases the regulator holds the power to impose one and has not published a figure.

That is a more interesting answer than it first appears, because Pakistan has just built the machinery. In October 2026 the medical regulator brought in a full set of accreditation standards for CPD providers, referencing a national CPD policy that is not publicly available. The supply side is being regulated before the demand side exists.

Nurses: no requirement, and a voluntary programme

The governing statute is the Pakistan Nursing Council (Amendment) Act 2023, amending the Pakistan Nursing Council Act 1973, assented on 17 January 2023 and published in the Gazette of Pakistan Extraordinary on 21 January 2023. The Council was renamed in the process, so older sources refer to the Pakistan Nursing Council and current ones to the Pakistan Nursing and Midwifery Council.

CPD and continuing education are not mentioned anywhere in the Act. The Act also sets no statutory renewal interval and imposes no periodic re-registration requirement.

What it does do is create the power. New section 3A gives the Council authority to license and regulate practice, maintain the register, prescribe evidence of good health and good character, and — at section 3A(k)(ii) — to set and update conditions and policies for registration and licence to practice. The power to introduce CPD exists and has not been exercised.

Renewal is five-yearly and financial

The Council portal states that renewal is made every five years from the date of registration. The listed requirements are a processing fee slip, the original registration card, two passport photographs, an attested national identity card, attested professional diplomas and degrees, an attested matriculation certificate and an attested domicile certificate. Non-government staff must also submit a current employer certificate on the day and attend in person; government employees need not.

No CPD item appears among the renewal requirements.

On fees, two official Council pages disagree. One gives Rs 2,000; the other gives renewal at Rs 3,000 for nurses, lady health visitors and midwives, Rs 500 for a dai, new registration at Rs 3,000, a late fee of Rs 600 a year, an urgent fee of Rs 2,000, a duplicate card at Rs 2,000 and foreign national registration or renewal at Rs 10,000. A fee revision notification dated 19 October 2026 exists but could not be read, so the current renewal fee is unestablished and should be confirmed with the Council directly.

The CPD programme that does exist

The Council runs an approved CPD programme for registered nursing and midwifery professionals: free online internationally accredited courses, launched with the International Council of Nurses and the World Continuing Education Alliance, carrying content from the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives.

It states no hours, no credits, no cycle, and does not describe itself as mandatory. The only connection to registration is procedural: the sign-up form asks for a CPD completion date and tells the applicant to use the expiry date of their registration card, adding five years if it has expired. That aligns the CPD record with the five-year registration cycle without creating any requirement.

The page text still refers to the COVID-19 emergency, which suggests the programme dates from around 2020 or 2021 even though the page was refreshed in January 2026.

Two further pieces of evidence that nothing is mandatory: none of the Council fifteen published notifications mentions CPD or continuing education, and no provider accreditation scheme for nursing CPD exists — the courses on offer are free and accredited externally.

One unresolved item worth chasing

The Pakistan Code lists a Pakistan Nursing and Midwifery Council Act, 2026, but the page serves only a title and navigation, with the text behind a document that could not be retrieved. Whether a consolidated 2026 Act exists, whether it is in force, and whether it introduces CPD could not be established. Anyone relying on the position above for a commercial decision should settle that question first.

Doctors: a provider regime without a published practitioner requirement

The registration instrument is the Pakistan Registration of Medical and Dental Practitioners Regulations 2023, made under section 9(2)(f) of the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council Act 2022. Renewal of licence is five years at Rs 10,000, whether on a basic or an additional postgraduate qualification. A late fee of Rs 2,000 a year applies after six months past validity.

CPD is not mentioned anywhere in these regulations. The nearest wording is a reference, in the definition of full registration, to the continuing validity of registration under the Act and applicable rules — which specifies no credit hours.

An amendment notice to those regulations dated 10 February 2025 exists but could not be read, so it is not possible to exclude the possibility that it added a CPD condition.

What came into force in October 2026

By notification dated 8 October 2026, under section 47(2)(k) of the 2022 Act and following Council approval on 5 October 2026, Pakistan brought in Standards for Accreditation of Continuing Medical Education and CPD Opportunity Providers 2026, with immediate effect. They apply to all CPD opportunity providers seeking accreditation of CPD activities by the Council.

The scheme is detailed:

• Ten standards covering governance, needs assessment, educational design, faculty, independence and conflict of interest, credit and records, evaluation, accessibility, documentation and grievances.
• 47 criteria scored 0 to 2, for a maximum of 94 points.
• Full Recognition above 85 per cent, valid up to three years subject to annual reporting; Conditional Recognition for one year with a corrective-action plan due within six months; Provisional Recognition at 60 to 74 per cent for one year with re-assessment; Not Recognized below 60 per cent.
• A score of zero on any core independence item means non-recognition regardless of the total. That is a strict provision and the one most likely to catch a commercial provider.
• Credit arithmetic: generally one CPD credit per contact hour, with a daily cap of 6 and a per-event cap of 18.
• The CPD function must be run on a not-for-profit basis, and fee structures must not create an unreasonable barrier to participation. No fee amounts are stated.

One caution on the detail: the recognition bands as rendered in the published document overlap between Full and Conditional, so the exact thresholds should be verified before being relied on.

The document that would answer the question, and is missing

The 2026 standards expressly reference a Pakistan National CPD Program: Policy and Guidelines, dated 2024, as already approved. That document is not published anywhere on the Council site. It is not on the standards page, and the October 2026 notification is the only CPD item among roughly two hundred public announcements.

So the number of CPD credits a Pakistani doctor must earn per year or per cycle could not be established from any primary source, and no figure is offered here. A secondary report attributes the one-per-hour, six-per-day and eighteen-per-event caps to that 2024 policy rather than to the 2026 standards, which if correct would mean the policy is the operative document for practitioners and it is simply not public.

What was announced, and what is superseded

In July 2025 the Council said it was preparing to launch a CPD system developed with the United States Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, including accredited online and in-person modules, clinical workshops, performance-based evaluation and digital compliance tracking, described as designed to integrate directly into the licensing and renewal cycle. That was an announcement, not an instrument: no regulation, notification or policy document was named and no credit hours or cycle were given.

Going the other way, there is a historical regime that should not be presented as current. Under the former Council, continuing medical and dental education certification was a condition of renewal of registration, and in September 2015 the management committee waived the submission requirement to 31 October 2015 and approved simplified criteria said to apply nationwide from 1 January 2016. That sat under the pre-2019 ordinance, superseded by the 2019 Act and then by the 2022 Act and the 2023 Regulations, which contain no CPD condition. No instrument carrying the 2015 requirement forward could be found.

The practical position

A Pakistani nurse needs no CPD and renews registration every five years on documents and a fee. A Pakistani doctor renews a licence every five years at Rs 10,000, with no CPD condition in the regulations, while the regulator operates an accreditation regime for CPD providers and references a practitioner policy nobody can read.

For a training provider the reading is mixed. There is now a real accreditation pathway on the medical side with published standards, scoring and recognition terms, which is more than several neighbours offer. But there is no published requirement driving demand, the CPD function must be not-for-profit, and no accreditation fee is stated. The sensible step is to obtain the 2024 policy from the Council directly before committing anything.

For comparison, Malaysia requires 20 points of each profession through quite different legal routes, India requires 30 credits of nurses over five years and nothing of doctors, and Kenya requires 50 points of doctors and 20 of nurses every year. Pakistan is the only one of the four building the provider framework first.