Paramedicine Board CPD: 30 Hours and the Scheme’s Highest Interactive Floor

The Paramedicine Board of Australia sets the highest participatory requirement in the national scheme. Registered paramedics must complete 30 hours of continuing professional development a year, and at least eight of those hours must be in an interactive setting with other practitioners. No other National Board sets an interactive floor that high.

Thirty hours, eight of them interactive

The requirement is 30 hours of CPD each year, including a minimum of eight hours of CPD in an interactive setting with other practitioners. The standard defines interactive as learning involving a two-way flow of information occurring with other practitioners, such as face-to-face or interactive online education.

Eight hours out of 30 is a little over a quarter of the total. Compare that with the five-hour floors set by several other boards inside 20-hour totals, and paramedicine is demanding both more hours overall and a larger participatory share. For a profession whose work is already delivered in crews and teams, that is a coherent design rather than an accident, but it does make paramedicine the most expensive registered profession in the scheme to supply CPD to, because interactive delivery costs more per hour than recorded material.

Planning and reflection do not count toward the thirty

This is the detail most likely to produce an unintentional shortfall. The Board requires a portfolio documenting learning goals, planned activities, reflection on how the activities have improved or are expected to improve practice, and evidence of completion. But the time spent planning and reflecting cannot be included in the 30 hours.

So the portfolio is mandatory work that earns nothing. A paramedic who logs an hour of reflective writing against a two-hour course and records three hours has over-claimed, and a provider whose course includes a reflective component should be clear about how many of the advertised hours are creditable activity rather than documentation.

Pro rata, and what the standard does not say

A paramedic registering part-way through a registration period completes seven and a half hours of CPD for every three months of registration remaining. The standard does not state the calendar start and end dates of the registration period itself, and it is worth not assuming: the Dental Board's cycle runs 1 December to 30 November, but that figure cannot be carried across to paramedicine by inference. A paramedic needing the exact dates should confirm them against the Board's own renewal information rather than a general source.

Records of CPD activity must be kept for five years. There is no first aid, resuscitation or life-support requirement in the paramedicine CPD standard — the standard imposes two obligations only, the hours and the portfolio. That contrasts with podiatry, where resuscitation training sits outside the hours as a separate standing requirement, as set out in our guide to podiatry CPD and its four possible totals.

How the interactive floor changes procurement

For an ambulance service or a private provider employing paramedics, the eight interactive hours are the scarce item and the thing a budget has to be built around. The remaining 22 hours can be filled from recorded and self-directed material at low marginal cost. The eight cannot.

The useful question to ask of any paramedicine CPD offering is therefore not how many hours it carries but how many of them are interactive by the standard's own definition — a genuine two-way flow of information with other practitioners. A webinar watched passively is not interactive merely because it was delivered live, and a module with a quiz at the end is not interactive because the quiz responded. Where a provider cannot say clearly which of its hours meet that test, the safe assumption is none of them.

Where it sits in the scheme

At 30 hours, paramedicine sits level with psychology on the headline figure, but the two are structured differently: psychology's 30 contains a 10-hour peer consultation component that no provider can sell at all, as explained in our guide to the Psychology Board's peer consultation requirement. Paramedicine's eight interactive hours are purchasable; psychology's ten peer consultation hours are not. Our comparison of why Ahpra CPD hours are not comparable across National Boards sets out each board's published position with its sub-quotas attached.

One currency warning

A joint consultation covering fourteen National Boards, paramedicine among them, closed on 17 July 2026. The draft proposed a common requirement of 20 hours a year including five interactive hours. For paramedicine that would be a reduction on both counts, from 30 hours to 20 and from eight interactive hours to five.

Nothing has been approved, and the standard in force is the 30-hour requirement described here. Do not plan against the draft figures. The Board keeps its standards under its professional standards section rather than the pattern the other boards use, and the CPD standard can be reached from the Paramedicine Board's CPD registration standard page.