Yes — online CPD counts fully toward your GCC annual requirement. The General Chiropractic Council does not stipulate that CPD must be delivered in person. Online courses, webinars, recorded conference sessions, and self-directed e-learning are accepted on the same basis as face-to-face training, provided the learning is relevant to your practice and properly documented.
The more useful question is not whether online CPD counts, but how to choose online CPD that is genuinely worthwhile — and how to document it in a way that would hold up if you were selected for a GCC audit.
What the GCC Actually Evaluates
The GCC's CPD framework is built around outcomes, not delivery methods. When assessing whether an activity qualifies as CPD, the GCC looks at four things: whether the learning was relevant to your scope of practice, whether the content was evidence-based and appropriate to your professional level, whether you can demonstrate reflection on what you learned, and whether you have evidence that the activity took place.
An online course that meets all four criteria is as valid as a full-day in-person workshop. A face-to-face conference you attended without engaging seriously is not automatically better CPD than an online module you worked through with genuine attention. The format is incidental. The quality of the learning and the quality of your documentation are what matter.
Understanding Provider Accreditation
Many online CPD providers describe their courses as "GCC-accredited". It is worth understanding what this phrase actually means, because it is sometimes used loosely.
The GCC does not formally accredit CPD providers. What exists is accreditation from independent bodies — organisations that review course content against established quality standards and award recognition to providers who meet them. ManualCPD is accredited through The CPD Group (Provider #788442), an independent accreditation organisation. Accreditation from a body like this is a meaningful quality signal: it tells you the content has been assessed by a third party, not just by the provider themselves.
For your CPD portfolio, courses from an independently accredited provider give you cleaner documentation. The certificate references the accrediting body, and in the event of an audit, the evidence trail is clear. Non-accredited courses can still qualify as CPD — relevance and quality matter more than any badge — but they require more detailed reflection notes to demonstrate their value, because the content has not been independently verified.
Types of Online CPD Available to Chiropractors
The range of online CPD has expanded considerably, and the main formats you will encounter each have different strengths.
On-demand courses are the most flexible. You complete them at your own pace, which suits practitioners managing a busy clinical schedule. Good on-demand courses include some form of assessment — typically multiple choice questions aligned to the learning objectives — and issue a certificate on completion. That certificate, alongside a brief personal reflection, is the foundation of your portfolio entry for that activity.
Live webinars offer a more interactive experience. The real-time delivery and the ability to put questions to a presenter can deepen engagement with the material, and many practitioners find the structure of a scheduled session easier to follow through on than self-paced study. Most providers also offer recordings for those who cannot attend live, though passive viewing of a recording requires more deliberate engagement to constitute genuine CPD.
Recorded conference sessions give you access to the content of major CPD events without the logistical overhead of attending in person. The learning quality can be high, but it requires honesty with yourself: it is easy to half-watch a recorded session in a way you would not half-attend a live one.
Structured e-learning that combines reading, short video content, interactive elements, and assessment tends to produce the deepest learning when it is well designed. The assessment is not just a mechanism for issuing a certificate — it consolidates what you have worked through and gives you a clearer sense of what you have actually retained.
Building an Audit-Ready Online CPD Portfolio
However you complete your online CPD, the quality of your documentation determines how robust your records are if the GCC requests your portfolio.
For each online course or webinar, your portfolio entry should include the date and duration of the activity, the provider and course title, and your certificate of completion. Alongside that, write a brief reflection — a paragraph noting what you set out to learn, what you took from the activity, and how it connects to your clinical practice. This does not need to be lengthy. It needs to be honest and specific.
The portfolios that hold up best in audit are the ones that tell a coherent story. Not a collection of certificates, but a record of a practitioner who identified areas for development, sought out learning that addressed them, and engaged with it thoughtfully. That is what the GCC is looking for — and it is also, not coincidentally, what CPD is actually for.