Today’s correspondent draws my attention to an ad by a event health service provider asking for health professionals to volunteers as part of their health service team at a significant sporting event.   The ad says:

Not only will you learn about race medicine, gaining valuable hands-on experience in this emerging field, you will also fulfil annual CPD requirements.

My correspondent says this:

… suggests it is a training opportunity but also the business advertises themselves as providing critical care services to patrons at the event.

Does a volunteer shift meet AHPRA CPD requirements for nursing, medicine or paramedicine? Obviously multiple health services (registered charities and for profits) rely on unpaid volunteers to conduct their services.

In my interpretation these health services are a businesses using volunteers instead of employees to provide a paid service, and therefore the employees would be expected to deploy their existing knowledge, rather than obtain training or experience on the day.

Where for-profit health services are using health professional volunteers to provide their paid services, are they creating an employment relationship and therefore their staff should be remunerated under the Fair Work Act?

Employment

I can deal with the last question first, and that is no asking people to volunteer even health professionals and even where the organisation is making a profit, does not create an employment relation.  Organisations, including for profit organisations, can use volunteers. Employment depends on the terms of the agreement and volunteers clearly are not employees (see Are Tasmanian retained firefighter employees? (July 25, 2024) and FRNSW bandmembers cannot seek remedy for unfair dismissal (May 20, 2024)).

CPD

I’ll focus on paramedics. The Paramedicine Board’s CPD standard does not define what constitutes CPD leaving it to professionals to determine whether their CPD needs are and what might help them to gain new relevant knowledge, fill identified gaps in their knowledge or otherwise inform their practice.

The publication CPD activities that meet the standard help professionals decide what will be accepted as CPD.   CPD may include

• ‘Practice observation’, that is:

You spend time observing a professional colleague (may be from a different profession) and record your reflection on how you built on your knowledge and improved your patient outcomes. If you spend time discussing your observations with a colleague, then this would meet the interactive requirement.

• ‘Work-based learning’, that is:

‘You attend a professional development workshop (content that meets the objectives set out in the CPD registration standard) that your employer has organised and record how what you learnt built on your knowledge and/or competence.’

Acting as an event helath service volunteer would not meet that definition of work-based learning. It might meet the definition of ‘practice observation’ if they identified in their CPD plan what it was they wanted to learn, they were ‘shadowing’ another professional to watch them work and perhaps assist and provide care under supervision, and kept a record of the work, debriefed with their mentor after the event and reflected on what they had learned.

What does not count as CPD is ‘Voluntary work’ that is

You are volunteering because you see it as a good thing to do but it’s not clear what you learnt or how it has contributed to your professional learning and development.

If a professional is volunteering to join the medical team without formal learning goals and a plan to meet those goals then he or she is expected to have the competence to perform that task.  Good care requires a practitioner to ‘ensure that, when moving into a new area of practice, you have sufficient training and/or qualifications to achieve competency in that new area’ (Paramedicine Board, Shared Code of Conduct, [1.2(b)]).  Just joining the team in the belief that at the end of the experience you will have gained the training and experience is not good care nor is it CPD. CPD requires the practitioner ot plan their training needs to meet their goals and then there needs to be training, not just ‘having a go’.  If a person wanted to count joining this medical team as CPD they would have to identify what it was they wanted to learn, discuss with the organisers how they might receive that training eg through pre-event seminars and working with a nominated mentor.  Simply showing up, having a go and saying ‘wow that was a great experience, I learned so much’ is not the equivalent of reflective CPD.

Conclusion

I very much doubt that volunteering as part of a medical team to get ‘hands on experience’ without more, in particular detailed analysis of what the professional wants to learn, how the organisers will facilitate that learning along with reflective action after the event to consolidate their learning, would or could count as CPD for any registered health professional in Australia.

This blog is made possible with generous financial support from (in alphabetical order) the Australasian College of Paramedicine, the Australian Paramedics Association (NSW), the Australian Paramedics Association (Qld), Natural Hazards Research Australia, NSW Rural Fire Service Association and the NSW SES Volunteers Association. I am responsible for the content in this post including any errors or omissions. Any opinions expressed are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or understanding of the donors.