CPD evidence and certificates

Every course, webinar and study day leaves a certificate, and it is the certificate an audit or an annual declaration asks you to produce. The CPD evidence store is where they live: upload one, and Sessional reads the provider, title, date and hours off it so you can confirm them rather than type them. On the plans that include receipts by email, forwarded certificates stay in the receipt queue until you select This is a certificate.

A certificate can then be attached to any record on your professional record→, so the entry and the proof stay together for the whole of your cycle.

The document store→ holds the paperwork an organisation asks for before you can work: DBS, indemnity, immunisations, right to work, each with an expiry date to watch. A CPD certificate is a different thing. It never expires, nobody vets it before a shift, and what matters about it is the hours and outcomes it evidences to your regulator.

So they are kept apart. Certificates do not clutter the compliance documents you share with an organisation, and they are free, because a record of what you learned is a regulatory obligation rather than a paid extra.

Upload a PDF or a photo, including one taken on your phone camera. A photo has its hidden details, such as the location and the device it was taken on, removed before it is stored; a PDF is stored exactly as you sent it. The certificate is read for you and the values come back as editable fields marked From the certificate:

Correct anything that is wrong, then press Confirm. Nothing is stored as fact until you do. If the read came back empty or garbled, type over it: a dark scan or an unusual layout defeats any reader, and the certificate is stored either way.

There are two directions, and both end in the same place.

• From a record: open a reflection or CPD entry, press Attach a certificate, and pick one from the store or upload it there and then.
• From the store: press File as a CPD record beside any certificate you have not filed yet. The record form opens with the certificate already attached, its title and date filled in for you to check, a note saying whether those are values you confirmed or only what the reader found, and the hours it states shown beside the input, ready for you to write what you took from it.

A record can carry more than one certificate, and a certificate is filed against one record. Take it off the record and it goes back to the store, ready to attach somewhere else.

Forward it to receipts@email.sessional.co.uk, the same address you send receipts to, from the email address on your account. It stays in the receipt queue, marked as looking like a certificate when recognised. Select This is a certificate to move it to CPD evidence. The provider, title, date and hours are then read for you to check and confirm.

Telling a certificate from a receipt is a judgement, and it will sometimes be wrong. So it goes both ways, in one press:

• A course invoice that landed here as a certificate: press This is a receipt, and it becomes a draft expense waiting to be checked and confirmed, with the file moved across with it.
• A certificate that landed in your expenses: press This is a certificate on the receipt, and it moves into the evidence store, ready to read and file against a record.

A course you paid for can be both, of course: the fee is an expense and the certificate is evidence. Forward the invoice and the certificate separately, then move the certificate from the receipt queue.

Download evidence bundle gives you one ZIP of every certificate you hold, on every plan, each named by date, provider and title so the files sort themselves, plus an index.csv listing the title, provider, date, hours, the outcome or domain your regulator uses, the record each one is filed against, its filename, and a last column, Checked by you. A certificate you have not yet confirmed is listed with the values the reader found, and that column says nobody has checked them.

It is the file to hand over when an audit asks for your evidence, or to keep as your own copy outside Sessional. A bundle is capped at 100 MB, and you are told so rather than being handed a download that will not finish. If you reach it, delete what you no longer need.

The same store is on the NMC revalidation page→. The CPD entry form has the same certificate picker, so a participatory hour and the proof of it are logged in one go. It is free on every tier, like the rest of the revalidation tracker.

Delete removes the file and everything read off it, for good. If the certificate was attached to a record, the record itself stays exactly as you wrote it and simply loses the attachment, so a reflection is never lost with a file. Deleting your account deletes the whole store with it.