If you only record the title of the webinar and the number of hours, you have recorded the least useful half of it. Every National Board that audits CPD wants the same four things: the learning need you identified, the plan you made, the activity you did, and what changed in your practice afterwards. Three of those four live in your head, and they leave it fast.
So the answer to "what am I meant to log" is six fields, and one of them does most of the work.
Key takeaways
- Log within 48 hours. The activity and the hours are easy to reconstruct later. The reflection is not.
- Six fields: activity and provider, date, hours, the learning need it answered, your reflection, and the evidence file.
- AHPRA does not run a CPD home or a universal CPD portal. CPD homes are separate organisations accredited by the Australian Medical Council, and they exist for doctors only.
- Your CPD home gives you the system. It does not generate the content. Reflection cannot be auto-filled.
- Nurses and midwives must keep CPD records for at least five years from the date the CPD was completed.
- Requirements are set profession by profession, so check your own Board's registration standard before you trust a generic template.
AHPRA does not run a CPD home
Worth clearing up first, because the phrase describes something that does not exist. There is no AHPRA CPD portal you log into. AHPRA's own position is that CPD is set Board by Board: "The CPD requirements of each National Board are detailed in the Registration Standards for each profession, published on each Board website" (Ahpra, Continuing Professional Development).
A CPD home is a narrower thing than most people assume. It is a medical concept, it applies to doctors, and the accrediting body is not AHPRA. Under the Medical Board of Australia's current standard, doctors must "join an AMC-accredited CPD home (unless exempt)", write a professional development plan before starting each year's CPD, complete 50 hours each calendar year, "log CPD activities with your CPD home", and declare which home they used when they renew (Medical Board of Australia, What do I need to do?). The homes are accredited by the Australian Medical Council, not by AHPRA.
If you are a nurse, midwife, psychologist, physiotherapist, pharmacist or dentist, you do not have a CPD home. You have a registration standard, an hours requirement, and a record you keep yourself. The logging discipline in this article is the same either way. Only the place the record lives changes. For the hours and cycle that apply to you, start with our AHPRA CPD requirements guide rather than a generic template.
"My CPD home records it for me"
This is the most common reason a portfolio turns out to be thin, and it is a fair reading of what the Board actually says. Here is the strongest version of it, in the Board's own words:
CPD homes "coordinate CPD programs, ensure quality activities and help doctors keep track of their CPD hours with a system for CPD record-keeping".
Medical Board of Australia, About CPD homes
Notice what the home supplies: a system. Fields, a running total, a nudge when one category is short. What it does not supply is the content of those fields. The home cannot know why you sat through two hours on delirium screening, and it certainly cannot know you rewrote your assessment template the following week because of it.
The Board is explicit that the logging is yours: doctors "must log CPD activities with their CPD home". The home counts. You write.
The six fields
1. The activity and the provider
Name it precisely enough that a stranger could find it. "RACGP webinar, Managing anticoagulation in frailty" beats "anticoag update". Always include the provider, because for most categories of acceptable evidence the provider is the party who can verify you were there.
2. The date
The real date, not the month you are logging it in. CPD is assessed against a defined period, so an activity dropped into the wrong year is worse than one logged late. It inflates one year and hollows out the other.
3. The hours
Time actually spent, in hours. The Medical Board's audit guidance is blunt that "activities measured in credits or points are not acceptable" and that "all activities claimed must be in hours" (Medical Board of Australia, FAQ: general registration CPD, last reviewed 9 May 2023). If your college gives you points, convert them and keep the conversion visible.
Doctors also need to watch which bucket the hours land in. The 50 hours split into 25 hours of reviewing performance and measuring outcomes, with a five hour minimum of each type, 12.5 hours of educational activities, and 12.5 hours you allocate yourself. One useful wrinkle: writing and reviewing your professional development plan counts, and the Board classifies that time "as a performance measurement activity" (Types of CPD). The plan you resented writing pays for itself. Our CPD hours by profession breakdown has the split for other professions.
4. The learning need it answered
This is the field nobody fills in, and it is half the audit. The Nursing and Midwifery Board's guidelines say evidence must demonstrate that the practitioner has "identified and prioritised their learning needs, based on their self-reflection and evaluation of their practice against the relevant competency or professional practice standards" and "developed a learning plan based on identified learning needs" (NMBA, Guidelines: Continuing professional development).
One line is enough. "Two near misses with insulin charting in June, wanted the current guidance." Written the same week, that sentence is the difference between a portfolio and a list.
5. The reflection
The same NMBA guidelines require evidence that you "reflected on the value of the learning activities or the effect that participation will have on their practice". The Medical Board's evidence table attaches the same condition to almost every reflective category: a clinical audit needs "a reflection on what was learned", a peer review needs "a reflection on what was learned", a performance appraisal needs documentation of how you reviewed or improved your practice "and a reflection on what was learned".
A portal field labelled Reflection with a 2,000 character limit is not asking how the session made you feel. It asks one question. What will you do differently? Answer that in a sentence or two and stop, because nobody has ever been credited extra hours for prose.
If the honest answer is "nothing, this confirmed current practice", write that. Confirmation is a legitimate outcome, and it is better evidence than an invented change.
6. The evidence file
Attach the thing that proves the activity happened. The Board's guidance on acceptable evidence is specific about the difference between proof of attendance and proof of intention to attend:
- Courses, conferences, seminars: a certificate or record of attendance, or a letter from the organiser or your employer verifying attendance. A receipt, itinerary, agenda or program does not count. None of them show you were in the room.
- Online learning: web-based verification such as a printout of the completion screen or a list of completed modules, a statement of participation, or a certificate of completion.
- Reading: a documentation trail listing what you read, with authors, titles and dates. Unplanned, unmeasured reading and web surfing are excluded by name.
- Discussions, journal clubs, practice meetings: a record or letter of attendance, or minutes, showing the organisation, date, time and duration.
The pattern is consistent across the list. Whoever ran it should be able to confirm you were there, or you should have a dated artefact that only exists because you did the thing.
There is something quietly funny about a regulator having to specify, in writing, that a conference program is not proof you attended the conference. Someone tried it. Probably several someones, over several years, until it earned its own row in a table.
How long to keep it
Longer than you think. Nurses and midwives have the clearest instruction: "You must keep records of your CPD activities for at least five (5) years from the date you completed the CPD", and all records "must be available for audit or if needed by the NMBA as part of an investigation arising from a notification (complaint)".
That second clause is the one worth sitting with. CPD records are not only audit material, and a complaint investigation is exactly the moment you least want to be reconstructing 2023 from old calendar invitations. If the records have already gone missing, we wrote about what happens when you cannot meet your CPD requirements.
Retention periods genuinely differ between professions, so check your own Board's standard before you clear anything out. The shortest number you find online is unlikely to be yours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does AHPRA have a CPD home portal I need to log into?
No. AHPRA does not operate a CPD home or a universal CPD portal. CPD homes are separate organisations accredited by the Australian Medical Council, and the requirement to join one applies to medical practitioners under the Medical Board of Australia's standard. Practitioners in other professions record their own CPD against their Board's registration standard, in whatever format they choose.
Do I need a CPD home if I am a nurse or an allied health practitioner?
No. The CPD home requirement is specific to doctors. Every other regulated profession meets its CPD obligations by completing the hours set in its Board's registration standard and keeping its own documentation. Professional bodies do offer portfolio tools, and some are genuinely good, but using one is a choice rather than a registration requirement. See our CPD guide for nurses for the NMBA specifics.
How soon after an activity should I record it?
Within 48 hours, while the reflection is still real. The name, date and hours can be reconstructed from an inbox months later. What you intended to change cannot, and that is the field Boards examine most closely. Contemporaneous records also read better in an audit than forty entries made the week before renewal.
Is a receipt or a calendar invitation enough evidence?
No. The Medical Board's evidence guidance lists receipts, itineraries, agendas and programs as documents that do not show you actually attended. What works is a certificate or record of attendance, a statement of participation, a completion screen printout for online modules, or written confirmation from the organiser or your employer.
What do I write in the reflection field if the session did not change anything?
Write exactly that, and say what it confirmed. "Confirmed our current wound care protocol matches the updated guidance, no change to practice" is honest, specific and auditable. An invented change is worse than no change, because a record that does not match your actual practice is the kind of inconsistency an assessor notices.
Can compliance software log my CPD for me?
Software can hold the record, prompt you for missing fields, flag a short category and keep your evidence files together. It cannot write your learning need or your reflection, and it cannot decide on your behalf whether you have met your Board's standard. That is your declaration at renewal, and yours to substantiate.
Monday morning
Open your last three CPD entries and read only the reflection field. If one is blank, or says "good session", you have found the gap, and those three are still close enough to fix from memory. Anything older than a month or so is gone, and the honest move there is to leave it alone.
Then change the habit that caused it. Log the reflection before you close the tab.
AHCRA's compliance platform is being built to include CPD tracking that keeps the six fields, the evidence files and the retention clock in one place, and our CPD courses, coming soon, are designed to record the attendance evidence for you at the point you complete them. We are an independent education and compliance platform, not affiliated with AHPRA or any government authority, and no platform can make a compliance determination on your behalf. We educate. We don't regulate.
Healthcare compliance specialists
The AHCRA Compliance Team writes and reviews AHCRA's guidance, drawing on clinical and healthcare compliance experience across practice management, healthcare IT, and Australian regulation.
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