Ethics, Probity and Professionalism Courses for health practitioners facing a Council or Board investigation, a Professional Conduct Committee or the Tribunal

Start with the Core Set above. Those nine cover both halves of what your Council or Board reads: the standards you are judged against — the Ethics and Professionalism pair written for your own profession — and what it weighs once the facts are settled: insight, reflection, remediation, assurance the concern will not recur, and how the process itself works. They apply to every investigation, whatever the concern.

Then add the courses that match the concern actually raised. The page for your own profession groups the remaining courses by the type of concern, so choose the type named in your letter and you will see the courses that address it directly.

Speak to your indemnity insurer, union or lawyer before you respond. They will tell you what evidence is appropriate for your particular matter. If you are taking several, the Bulk Buy Offer covers any five or any ten.

It depends on the stage your matter is at: your Council or Board runs the process (a competence review, a health process — the Act’s fitness to practise route — or a referral of your conduct), a Professional Conduct Committee investigates the conduct on its behalf, and one national Tribunal — the HPDT — hears a charge. Check the letterhead on your letter, and see who investigates you above for the full picture.

Interim suspension is your Council or Board suspending your practising certificate — or adding conditions to your scope of practice — while a competence review, a health assessment or a Professional Conduct Committee investigation is still under way, where it believes there is a risk of serious harm to the public. It is protective rather than punitive and is not a finding against you.

You are given the opportunity to respond before the order is made, and the authority can revoke it at any time once satisfied you can practise safely. Contact your indemnity insurer, union or lawyer the same day. What you put in writing first shapes everything that follows.

Yes. Healthcare Ethics Courses issues a CPD certificate for every course, recording 2 CPD hours, the course title and the date of completion. That is what makes it usable as evidence in a response, a remediation plan or a professional development record.

The courses are written to the standards your Council or Board publishes under the Act. Each authority sets its own recertification requirements — the Nursing Council, for example, asks for 60 hours of professional development in three years — so confirm with yours how the hours should be recorded.

Access runs for twelve months from the date of purchase. You start immediately, work at your own pace, and there is no schedule to keep to within that period.

Finishing a course does not end your access. Once you have completed it and downloaded your certificate you can return to the material as often as you like for the rest of the twelve months, at no further cost.

No. The certificate records the date you completed the course, and that date does not change. Revisiting the material inside your twelve months does not produce a newly dated one.

If you need a certificate carrying a later date — because a Council, a Board, an employer or the Tribunal has asked for recent evidence — you buy the course again. Within twelve months of your original purchase a repeat is half price; after twelve months it is the full NZ$200.

No. No course, from us or from anyone else, determines the outcome of a Council or Board investigation, a competence review, a Professional Conduct Committee investigation or a Tribunal hearing, and any provider suggesting otherwise is worth treating with caution.

What a course can do is help you build the insight and reflection your response needs, and give you a dated, verifiable certificate to evidence it. How much weight that carries depends on the circumstances of the individual case.

Four things, and the order matters. Whether you understand what went wrong. Whether you accept responsibility for your part in it. Whether you recognise the effect it had — on the patient and their whānau, on colleagues, and on public confidence in the profession. And whether you can show meaningful change as a result.

Many responses supply the first and the last and leave out the middle two. That is a common shape of a finding that insight is lacking. The Insight, Reflection and Remediation courses address each in turn.

Orders of that kind are common: a Council or Board may require a course as part of a competence programme or as a condition on your practising certificate, and the Tribunal regularly orders a practitioner to complete a course in professional ethics or professional boundaries. Our Ethics, Professionalism, Professional Boundaries and Ethical Boundaries courses are written for that purpose and each issues a dated certificate.

Read the wording of the order with your indemnity insurer, union or lawyer.

Yes. There is no registration check and no requirement to hold a current practising certificate. The courses are taken as often by practitioners who are suspended, who have conditions on their scope of practice, or who are working towards a new practising certificate as they are by those with a live investigation.

If conditions require you to complete specific education, check the wording with your indemnity insurer, union or lawyer before choosing, so that what you complete matches what was ordered.

The one written for the Council or Board you are registered with, because that is the authority whose standards your conduct is measured against. Each carries 25 courses written for that profession. What differs is the wording, the FAQs, and the regulatory detail — which document applies, what it is called, and which of your authority’s guidelines sit beneath it.

That distinction is not cosmetic. There is no shared code in New Zealand: each of the 18 responsible authorities publishes its own standards of ethical conduct under the Act — Good medical practice for doctors, the Nursing Council’s Code of Conduct for nurses, the Dental Council’s Standards Framework, the Pharmacy Council’s Code of Ethics. A response that quotes the wrong document invites the reply that you have not understood what you are answering.

If your profession has no page of its own — Chinese medicine, paramedicine, occupational therapy, podiatry, dietetics, medical radiation technology, medical laboratory science, anaesthetic technology or psychotherapy — use the page for all healthcare professionals, which is written to the Act and the standards common to every authority.

Yes. Courses are taken privately online at your own pace. We never share participant details with any Council or Board, the Tribunal, an employer, a union or an indemnity provider unless you choose to do so yourself.

Many practitioners complete a course before deciding whether to include it in a submission at all.

Your own authority’s standards, and most publish something specific: the Nursing Council’s Guidelines: Professional Boundaries, the Dental Council’s professional boundaries practice standard, the Optometrists and Dispensing Opticians Board’s guideline on the maintenance of professional boundaries, and the Medical Council’s statement on sexual boundaries in the doctor–patient relationship. Citing another authority’s guideline is worse than citing nothing.

What every one has in common is where it puts the responsibility. Maintaining the boundary is the practitioner’s job, not the patient’s, and the imbalance of power is treated as a permanent feature of the relationship rather than something that ends at the door. Conduct of this kind is a common route to a charge of professional misconduct before the Tribunal, which is why an allegation in this category often reaches an authority from a colleague or an employer rather than from the patient.

Contact your indemnity insurer, union or lawyer before responding to an allegation in this category, and before contacting the patient or anyone connected with them.

Yes, and often particularly so. Practitioners who trained overseas are sometimes navigating an unfamiliar regulatory system at the same time as responding to a concern, and the vocabulary differs from what they learnt — practising certificate rather than licence, scope of practice rather than registration category, competence review rather than performance assessment, and a Council or Board for each profession rather than one regulator for all.

The courses are written to New Zealand standards and explain the process in New Zealand terms.