The GCC audits a proportion of chiropractors' CPD declarations each year. If your declaration is selected, you will receive a request to submit your CPD portfolio for review. For most practitioners who have genuinely completed 30 hours of relevant CPD and maintained reasonable records, this process is straightforward. For those who have not, it is not.
Understanding what GCC auditors actually look for — rather than what you imagine they look for — is the most useful thing you can do to both prepare a good portfolio and remove the anxiety that audit selection tends to create.
The Purpose of the Audit
The GCC audit is not primarily a compliance exercise designed to catch out practitioners. Its purpose is to ensure that CPD obligations are genuinely being met in the spirit they were intended — that chiropractors are actively engaged in professional development that maintains and improves the quality of care they provide to patients.
This framing matters, because it tells you what a good portfolio looks like. It is not a portfolio that ticks the most boxes or accumulates the most certificates. It is a portfolio that tells a credible, coherent story about a practitioner's professional learning over the course of a year.
What Auditors Assess
Evidence of activities. The first thing an auditor will check is whether the hours claimed are evidenced. For formal learning activities — courses, webinars, conferences — this means certificates of completion, attendance records, or similar documentation. For informal learning — peer discussion, journal reading, reflective practice — it means contemporaneous notes, reflections, or dated records that show the activity occurred.
Relevance to practice. Auditors assess whether the CPD activities claimed are genuinely relevant to the practitioner's scope of clinical practice. CPD must connect to what you actually do clinically, or to where you intend to develop your practice.
Quality of reflection. This is the element that separates a strong portfolio from a weak one. Auditors are not just looking at what activities you completed — they are looking at what you took from them. A portfolio that contains nothing but certificates, with no accompanying reflection, is significantly weaker than one that includes brief but thoughtful notes on each activity.
Reflection does not need to be lengthy. A few sentences per activity — describing why you chose it, what you learned, and how it connects to your practice — is sufficient. What matters is that it is specific and genuine.
A coherent narrative. The strongest portfolios tell a story. Not a forced or constructed narrative, but an authentic one — a year in the professional life of a practitioner who identified areas they wanted to develop and pursued learning accordingly.
Common Mistakes That Create Problems in Audit
Missing evidence for informal CPD. Practitioners often count peer discussions and reading as hours without creating any record at the time. When audited, they have no way to evidence these activities other than their own recollection, which auditors cannot verify.
Backdated records. A portfolio where all the reflection notes appear to have been written at the same time, close to the audit request, raises obvious questions. Contemporaneous documentation is more credible because it is more credible — you wrote it when the learning was fresh.
Implausible hour distributions. A portfolio showing zero CPD in the first ten months of the year and 30 hours in July and August is not impossible, but it invites scrutiny. A more natural distribution — learning activities spread across the year — is more convincing and, more importantly, reflects how genuine professional development actually works.
Certificates without reflection. A collection of certificates with no accompanying learning narrative is easy to spot and harder to pass. Adding reflection retrospectively is better than having none, but reflection written at the time is better still.
Building a Portfolio That Passes Before an Audit Is Called
The best approach to audit preparation is not to prepare for the audit at all — it is to maintain a portfolio throughout the year that would be ready if selected. After each CPD activity, spend five minutes updating your record: date, duration, what you did, what you learned. Keep the certificates from formal courses in the same place as your reflection notes.
If your portfolio is in good order, an audit selection is an administrative inconvenience, not a professional crisis.