A chiropractor sits down after a long clinic day and opens their CPD log. They type: 'Attended lumbar radiculopathy webinar. Good refresher.' Two sentences. Box ticked. That entry will satisfy the administrative requirement of recording CPD. It will not satisfy what the GCC actually expects — and the gap between those two things is wider than most practitioners realise.
The GCC's position is straightforward, even if it gets ignored in practice. Attendance is a starting point. Not an endpoint. The hours tell a regulator you were present somewhere. They say almost nothing about whether anything shifted — in your clinical reasoning, your patient communication, your understanding of where your own limits sit. Reflective practice is the mechanism that bridges being in the room and actually learning something. Without it, the log is just a receipt.
Reflection, in the sense the GCC expects, is not a diary entry or a content summary. It is an honest account of what the experience meant for you specifically. What it confirmed. What it challenged. What it made you uncertain about. What you did differently as a result — or plan to. A practitioner who attends a workshop on exercise prescription for chronic low back pain and writes a paragraph on how it shifted their approach to a particular presentation is producing meaningful evidence. A practitioner who logs the same workshop as four CPD hours and moves on is not. Regardless of how good the workshop was.
This matters practically because the GCC audits CPD portfolios, and what gets reviewed during those audits is not your total hours. It is your evidence of genuine engagement. The GCC expects chiropractors to connect their CPD activity to their individual scope of practice and their own identified development needs. That means the learning should be purposeful — chosen because it addresses a real gap, not because it was available or convenient — and the reflection should make that purpose legible to anyone reading it.
There is also a more clinical point worth sitting with. Reflective practice is useful in a way that passive attendance is not. Writing coherently about what you learned — and what you are still uncertain about — surfaces assumptions that would otherwise stay invisible. It slows the process down in a way that is productive. Many practitioners find the reflection reveals how much they did not absorb in the room. Or it prompts a follow-up question they would not otherwise have asked. That is not a failure of the learning activity. That is the learning activity working as it should.
The practical habit is straightforward, even if it takes time to build. Every CPD activity warrants at least a paragraph of honest reflection, written close to the time while the experience is still specific. Three questions, answered plainly:
What were you hoping to get from it? What did you actually get? What would you do differently in the next relevant clinical encounter?
Those three questions, answered honestly, produce the kind of evidence that holds up under scrutiny. More importantly, they produce the kind of CPD that was worth doing in the first place.
The GCC is not asking for a word count. It is asking whether you actually learned something. Your portfolio should be able to answer that question without you in the room to explain it.