Insights

June 2025

A key requirement under the Health Professions Act (HPA) is that all health regulatory colleges must establish and maintain a Continuing Competence Program (CCP) for their regulated members (registrants). That means 28 different health colleges and the health professionals whom they regulate across Alberta are involved in CCP activities every year!

ACSLPA’s CCP includes activities that have been shown in the literature to maintain and enhance competence, including completing continuing education, connecting with peers and colleagues for feedback and practice advice, and identifying both the risks to one’s competence, and supports that can be implemented to mitigate those risks.

Approximately 20% of all CCP submissions are audited every year, ensuring that all practicing registered members will be audited over a 5-year period.

Based on the results of this year’s audit, here are a few key “tips” for registrants’ future submissions:

Compared to last year, significantly fewer submissions were referred to the interview stage of the CCP in 2025.  Several factors may have impacted this decrease, including:

1. revisions to the CCP reporting forms to improve overall clarity (as based on feedback from registrants following last year’s audit):
2. the opportunity for a small number of registrants to provide written feedback to questions posed by auditors where it was obvious they had simply missed the provision of certain content:, and
3. auditors providing feedback in the form of “recommendations for future submissions” vs. a referral to interview for less significant items (e.g., missing reference information re: continuing education activities).

The primary reason submissions did not meet the requirements of the audit were similar to previous years; namely, that registrants did not directly answer the question of how their competence was impacted by completion of the required activities. While auditors can sometimes “read between the lines” and make assumptions about how one’s competence was impacted, having a conversation as part of the interview process was helpful in teasing out what specific learning registrants achieved through both the continuing education activities and peer dialogue.

Consistent with previous years, following the interviews, no registered members were referred to the record review stage of the program.

Feedback from a post interview survey completed by interviewees (n=10) revealed extremely high satisfaction (90%) with the interview as a method of evaluating participation in CCP activities. Significant improvements in satisfaction with communications pre-interview compared to 2024 were also noted.