Remediation courses for Health Practitioners facing a Council or Board notification, complaint or investigation

Start with the Core Set above. Those nine cover both halves of what the Council or Board reads: the standards you are judged against — Ethics for Healthcare Professionals and Professionalism for Healthcare Professionals, both written to your authority’s standards of ethical conduct — 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 notification whatever the concern.

Then add the courses that match the concern actually raised. Use the selector above: choose the type of concern 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. Each course is NZ$200 and carries 2 CPD hours; the Bulk Buy Offer covers any five for NZ$850 or any ten for NZ$1,400, saving up to NZ$600.

Your Council or Board. It alone decides whether you hold a practising certificate, what conditions sit on your scope of practice, and whether you are fit to practise. Each authority considers a notification first, through its Registrar or a delegated committee, and chooses the route the Act provides: a competence review, its health process, or a Professional Conduct Committee for conduct — or an educational letter, or no further action.

A Professional Conduct Committee is appointed by the Council or Board but acts independently of it. It investigates the particular concern referred to it and reports back with recommendations, which may include laying a charge before the Tribunal.

The Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal is the last stage and the only one that can find professional misconduct. Check the letterhead on your letter: it tells you which stage you are at.

Interim suspension is the 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. In many cases an agreement setting temporary limitations on your practice is reached instead.

You are given the opportunity to respond before an order is made, and the Council or Board 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.

On accreditation: the courses are written to your authority’s standards of ethical conduct and the standards and guidelines your authority publishes beneath it, but are not accredited or endorsed by your Council or Board or any other New Zealand body, and no responsible authority accredits courses from any provider. Whether the hours count towards your authority’s recertification programme is for that programme to say: some count hours (the Nursing Council, the Physiotherapy Board, the Chiropractic Board, the Osteopathic Council), some ask for a plan, activities and written reflection with no hours (the Dental Council, the Pharmacy Council, the Psychologists Board), and some require Board-accredited activities for particular credits (the ODOB). Check your own programme, and keep the certificate with your own written reflection.

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 the Council or 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 notification, 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: the Council or Board may require a course as part of a recertification programme or as a condition on your practising certificate, and the Tribunal regularly orders a health 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.

Whether a particular course satisfies a particular order is for the body that made it. Read the wording of the order with your indemnity insurer, union or lawyer, and where it requires approval in advance, seek that approval before you enrol.

Yes. There is no registration check and no requirement to hold a current practising certificate. The courses are taken as often by every health practitioner 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 notification.

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.

Use your own page. Doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, pharmacists, psychologists, physiotherapists, chiropractors, osteopaths, and optometrists and dispensing opticians each have a page written to their own authority’s standards, with its own pair of Ethics and Professionalism courses and its own FAQs; the ten are listed above. The other 22 courses are the same on every page.

This page is for every other registered practitioner: acupuncturists and Chinese medicine practitioners, paramedics, occupational therapists, podiatrists, dietitians, medical radiation technologists, medical laboratory scientists and anaesthetic technicians, and psychotherapists. Its Ethics and Professionalism pair is written to the standards common to every Council and Board.

Yes. The Chinese Medicine Council of New Zealand is the newest responsible authority under the Act, and its Standards of Professional Conduct (April 2023) and standards of clinical competence follow the same pattern as every other authority’s: honesty, boundaries, consent, records, and public trust in the profession. The Council handles competence, conduct and health concerns through the same three routes, refers conduct to a Professional Conduct Committee, and can impose interim conditions or suspension.

The courses on this page are written to that common pattern and explain the process in New Zealand terms; the Ethics and Professionalism pair here is the one to take.

Your own authority’s standard — every Council and Board publishes one, and the pattern is the same: maintain the boundary with the people in your care and those close to them; a sexual or intimate relationship with a current patient is a boundary violation; gifts, contact outside the care relationship, treating family and conduct online are judged on the same footing.

What every boundary standard 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. Boundary matters are a common route to a charge of professional misconduct before the Tribunal.

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

No. A concern that a mental or physical condition may affect your ability to practise safely goes into your authority’s health process under sections 45 to 50 of the Act — a medical examination where needed, then conditions, monitoring or suspension while you are unable to practise. It is a health process, not a conduct one. Employers and health practitioners are required to notify in this situation, and so are you.

What your authority still wants to see is insight into how the condition affected your practice and what you have put in place. The Insight and Reflection courses are as relevant here as in a conduct matter.

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, a competence review rather than a fitness to practise panel, and an authority that handles competence, health and conduct through three different routes.

The courses are written to the Act and the standards common to every Council and Board, and explain the process in New Zealand terms.

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

Many every health practitioner complete a course before deciding whether to include it in a submission at all.