DPC registration criteria: what the scientific commissions look at

A DPC provider registration file is not judged like a quality audit. The point is not to show that you can run a session, but that what you teach is well founded, that those teaching it are qualified to do so, and that no commercial interest steers the message. The criteria are set by a specific text, and they are applied through a scoring mechanism worth knowing about before you start drafting.

The governing text

The order of 14 September 2016 sets the registration criteria for organisations or structures wishing to offer continuing professional development activities through the national DPC agency, together with the composition of the activity presentation file. It sits within the framework laid down a few weeks earlier by decree no. 2016-942 of 8 July 2016 on the organisation of continuing professional development for health professionals.

That decree also refocused the role of the scientific commissions on assessing activities and providers. Structures previously registered with the DPC management body had three months from publication of the order to file a fresh application — hence the complete overhaul of the register at the end of 2016.

The criteria, one by one

The criteria cover, among others, the following six blocks.

Scientific validity of content. This is the heart of the file and what sets DPC apart from any other training scheme. What you teach must rest on current, referenced evidence — good-practice guidelines, published literature, work by learned societies — and not on experience alone, however solid. A file that describes its teaching method remarkably well but stays vague about its sources gets penalised here.

Qualifications of designers and speakers. Who writes the activity, who delivers it, with what titles, what clinical activity, what teaching experience. This is the hardest section to improve under time pressure: if your team lacks scientific standing on the subject at hand, no rewording will make up the gap. You have to recruit, partner up, or narrow the scope.

Arrangements for evaluating activities and running a quality-improvement process. How you measure what the activity produces, and how that result genuinely feeds back into the design of the next version. An end-of-session satisfaction questionnaire does not describe an improvement process.

Transparency of subcontracting arrangements. If you do not produce everything in-house, you must write it down and say with whom, on what scope and under what oversight.

Financial resources guaranteeing the provider’s independence, particularly from companies manufacturing or distributing health products.

The policy on managing links and conflicts of interest. Recording, declaring, handling.

The last two points attract particular attention. Assessing the financial independence of DPC providers, notably from companies in the health-products sector, is a major element of the assessment carried out by each of the scientific commissions, intended to guarantee strictly the independence of programme content. We devote a whole article to it: financial independence and conflicts of interest.

The scoring mechanism, and why it changes everything

This is what providers often discover too late. The assessment does not work like a single overall mark.

Each criterion is scored on a scale of 0 to 10. To be assessed favourably, the applicant must reach the pass mark in every section of the file. The score then leads to a finding issued by each commission concerned: “favourable assessment” or “unfavourable assessment”.

Two practical consequences follow.

Scores do not net out. Impeccable scientific content does not make up for a weak section on independence or on the evaluation of activities. The strategy of pouring all your time into your strong point and rushing the rest is precisely the one that fails. A file that is uniformly adequate beats a brilliant one with a hole in it.

Every competent commission assesses. The independent scientific commissions — seven in total — and the scientific commission of the High Council for Paramedical Professions assess providers on the basis of the information in the assessment file attached to the application. Each covers a set of professions. Targeting ten professions in a first application therefore means facing several assessments, each with its own standard on its own field.

Hence the recurring advice: start narrow. Registration obtained for two or three professions, with speakers whose standing is unquestionable on that scope, beats a sprawling file that gets refused. The scope can be widened afterwards.

The most underestimated criterion: evaluating activities

In practice, the section on evaluation arrangements and the improvement process is the one providers treat most lightly — often with a general sentence about collecting satisfaction data.

That is a pity, because it is also the area where the literature is clearest about what works. The Cochrane review by Noah Ivers and colleagues on audit and feedback (reference), published in 2012 from 140 studies, concludes that audit with feedback produces generally small but potentially important improvements in professional practice, and that its effectiveness depends on baseline performance and on how the feedback is delivered.

Translated for a DPC file: describing an evaluation system that measures something specific, feeds it back to participants and drives revision of the activity is not an administrative writing exercise. It describes a mechanism whose effect is documented — and that is precisely what a scientific commission recognises.

Preparing your file: the order that saves time

The natural drafting order is not the right working order. Here is the one that limits back-and-forth.

1. Set the scope. Which professions, which priority orientations. Everything else depends on it, including how many commissions you must convince.
2. Audit your scientific standing. Designers, speakers, titles, clinical activity. If the numbers do not add up, fix that before writing — it cannot be salvaged in the drafting.
3. Deal with independence immediately. Funding, partnerships, each speaker’s conflicts of interest, the declaration and management procedure.
4. Write down the sourcing. For each piece of content, the evidence it rests on.
5. Describe evaluation and improvement. What you measure, how you feed it back, how it returns in the next version.
6. Formalise subcontracting. Who, on what, with what oversight.

The administrative route and the deadlines that follow filing are covered in our article on the ANDPC registration procedure.

Take action

Take the six blocks of criteria and score yourself honestly from 0 to 10 on each, remembering that no high mark offsets a low one. The two or three weakest sections are your work plan — and it is better to work through it before filing than after an unfavourable finding. The full profile of the scheme is here: Registration as a DPC provider.