At its heart, IVFCPD courses contain links to the abstracts of recent peer reviewed publications in journals that serve the IVF industry. Links may also be to open access articles, webinars or podcasts, or other credible information.
In its simplest form, a new course starts with a single link to a publication on a particular theme. Each theme may be relevant to one or more professional groups of a clinic.
Each course may grow as IVFCPD collates additional links to similar articles that then start to provide a minimal resource on the topic.
However, each course may contain a variety of activities including detailed learning material,lists of key points, comments, additional reading, simple or complex questions and glossaries and crosswords.
Importantly, each course is dynamic and users may access new courses or revisit past courses when updated.
While there are many articles published each week concerning various aspects of IVF, all but a few academically minded staff actually read them. They however contain a wealth of information that most IVF staff either are disinclined to read or do not have access to them. These are the very staff to whom IVFCPD hopes to improve their working knowledge of IVF.
There are specialised courses that provide CPD content over an above those already described.
One type contains list of detailed questions over a range of topic or images. These can be used as a training programme or a test of general knowledge.
Another specialised course follows a structured CPD program format on a range of topics. These are designed as orientation material for new staff.
Each activity in each course attracts points (IVFCPD calls these CPD minutes) that reflect the time a user may expect to spend of on the activity.
