SMC CME: All 50 Points Can Be Obtained Online, Except Five

Singapore doctors need 50 CME points over a two-year qualifying period. The Singapore Medical Council's own circular states that all fifty of them can be obtained entirely online.

That is unusual among medical regulators, and it is worth understanding precisely, because the route runs through two category caps rather than a blanket permission — and there is one component you cannot obtain from any online provider at all.

The requirement, by practising certificate type

The qualifying period is 24 months. For a two-year full certificate that meant 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2025; for a one-year certificate, 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025. For reinstatement, points must be collected within the 24 months before the application date.

One eligibility point that catches people: from 1 April 2018, only doctors in reduced practice are eligible for the lower-fee certificate and its lower CME requirement. It is not a general option.

How the fifty points can all be online

The answer is in the category caps rather than in a general permission. The SMC sets no cap at all on Categories 1A, 1B and 1C — institutional programmes, local events and overseas events. The caps apply to the remaining categories:

• Category 2 (publications, editorial work, original papers and posters) — capped at 40 points
• Category 3A (self-study, refereed journals, Ministry of Health guidelines) — capped at 10 points
• Category 3B (accredited distance-learning programmes with verifiable self-assessment) — capped at 36 points

Thirty-six plus ten is forty-six. The SMC's circular puts the conclusion plainly: up to 46 of the 50 points required can be obtained by reading refereed medical journals and distance-learning programmes, and "all 50 points can be obtained entirely online". The Council also confirms that its CME guidelines allow CME to be conducted via e-platforms.

The operative words in Category 3B are "accredited" and "with verifiable self-assessment". A distance-learning programme without an assessment component, or from an unaccredited source, does not earn 3B points however good it is.

The ethics points you cannot buy from us, or from most providers

From 2026, a two-year full-fee certificate requires five medical ethics core points. This component is closed.

Only three organisations are approved by the SMC to conduct mandatory medical ethics programmes: the Academy of Medicine, Singapore; the College of Family Physicians Singapore; and the Singapore Medical Association. Ethics programmes from any other provider count only towards general, non-core points.

We are stating that plainly because it is the kind of thing a training provider is tempted to blur. If you need the five ethics core points, you need one of those three bodies. A course badged as ethics content from anyone else will accumulate general points and leave your core requirement unmet — which is a worse outcome than not taking it, because it looks like compliance.

The practical division for planning: 45 of the 50 points are open to accredited online learning, and 5 are not.

Why the specialty core is the other constraint

Ten of the fifty must sit in your registered specialty, or in Family Medicine. That is not a subject preference; it is a filter on which online content counts.

So a doctor assembling fifty points online is really assembling three separate pools: ten specialty-specific, five ethics from one of three bodies, and thirty-five that can come from any accredited source within the category caps. Treating it as one undifferentiated fifty is how people arrive at renewal with the right total and the wrong composition.

How this compares with the nursing position

Worth knowing if you manage a mixed clinical workforce in Singapore: the nursing requirement is not yet mandatory. The Singapore Nursing Board's pre-mandatory phase began on 1 September 2024, and its live guidance still states that nurses and midwives without sufficient points may continue to renew their practising certificate for 2027. Only Advanced Practice Nurses face a hard requirement today, at 30 points per qualifying period, of which not more than 15 may come from in-service programmes and at least 15 must relate to advanced practice nursing or the relevant clinical specialty.

Allied health is further behind again: the voluntary phase concludes on 31 December 2026, with CPE required only for renewals due from October to December 2028.

So among Singapore's clinical professions, doctors are the only group with a long-standing mandatory points requirement — which is also why they are the group with the clearest guidance on what counts.

A sourcing note

Singapore's regulator websites are largely rendered in the browser, and several are closed to automated retrieval. The figures above come from SMC circulars and announcements hosted on the health professionals portal, which are official SMC documents. The Medical Registration Regulations themselves were not readable, so we cannot tell you whether the CME requirement is set by regulation or by SMC guidelines alone — and we would rather say that than imply a statutory basis we have not seen.

Before relying on any figure here for a renewal, check it against the SMC's current circular for your certificate type. Qualifying periods move each cycle, and the ethics requirement only began to apply from 2026.

For the accountancy equivalent in the same market, where a chartered accountant who is also a registered public accountant owes two separate regimes at once, see our guide to ISCA and ACRA CPE. For the funding side, including the credits and subsidies available to Singapore citizens, see what you can actually claim through SkillsFuture. And for a points-and-categories medical regime structured very differently, our breakdown of Medical Council CPD categories covers the Irish position.