Probity Course for Healthcare Professionals CPD course for every UK healthcare professional facing a probity or dishonesty allegation, complaint or investigation — and for your CPD

The letter uses the word probity

Or honesty, or integrity, or dishonesty. Those words signal the most serious category your regulator has, and the response needs to be built differently from a clinical one.

You're under a fitness to practice investigation

A case is open with the GMC, GDC, NMC, GPhC, HCPC, GOC, GCC, GOsC or Social Work England, and you need documented CPD and written reflection to put behind your response.

A record or a claim is in question

An entry written after the fact, a form, a declaration, a CV, a timesheet, an insurance claim. Most probity cases start somewhere this ordinary.

Nothing has been raised

You want to understand where the line actually sits on declarations, conflicts and record corrections, before anyone asks.

Records and Retrospective Entries

Notes written later, corrections that are not clearly identified as corrections, and entries recording things that did not happen in the form recorded.

Financial Integrity

Claims, invoicing, timesheets, private fees, and payments or inducements that could look like they influenced a clinical decision.

Declarations and Disclosures

What you must tell your regulator and when — cautions, charges, findings by another body, restrictions imposed by an employer — and the separate concern of not telling them.

Conflicts of Interest

Interests that were not declared, or were declared but not managed, and referral or prescribing decisions that could be read as influenced by them.

Claims About Yourself

CVs, job applications, titles, qualifications, and how you describe your services and results in advertising.

Academic and Research Honesty

Authorship, data, and the reflective writing itself — a reflection that overstates is a probity problem of its own.

Overview of probity

What probity is, its legal, ethical and professional dimensions, and how it applies across different healthcare settings

Why probity matters

Why it's essential, and why regulators treat concerns about it differently from concerns about clinical performance

Core aspects of professional probity

Truthfulness in documentation and communication, financial integrity, academic honesty and research conduct, transparency in clinical care, and managing declarations and disclosures

Regulatory expectations and standards

The guidance issued by healthcare regulators, and how they assess a breach of probity once one is alleged

Insight, reflection and remediation

Developing detailed insight into past actions, reflective writing that learns rather than excuses, remediation strategies, and demonstrating that trustworthiness has been restored

Conclusion and assessment

Certificate issued on completion

It is judged on conduct, not intention

Your standards set honesty and integrity as a standard of behaviour. A panel looks at what you did and what you knew at the time, and asks whether that met the standard — not whether you felt you were being honest.

It goes to trust, not competence

A clinical gap can be closed with training, supervision and audit, and a panel can see the risk fall. Trust has to be rebuilt, and the only evidence of that is your account and your conduct since.

Qualified admissions make it worse

“I accept it looked that way, but…” reads as a defence rather than insight. Full acknowledgement first, explanation second, and never explanation in place of acknowledgement.

GMC

Good medical practice, Domain 4: Trust and professionalism — acting with honesty and integrity, paragraphs 81–101.

HCPC

Standards of conduct, performance and ethics, Standard 9: Be honest and trustworthy.

GCC

Code of Professional Practice, Principle C: act with honesty and integrity and maintain the highest standards of professional and personal conduct.

Your Own Regulator

The NMC, GDC, GPhC, GOC, GOsC and Social Work England all carry an equivalent. Look it up before you write, and quote the clause.

Probity

Being honest and trustworthy and acting with integrity. It covers records, claims about yourself, money and declarations, and openness with your regulator and employer — a wider idea than simply not lying.

Integrity

Acting consistently with professional standards whether or not anyone is checking, and being willing to justify a decision on its merits. Regulators treat it as inseparable from honesty.

Declaration

Telling your regulator, promptly, about matters they require to know — a caution or charge, a finding by another body, or a restriction imposed by an employer. Failing to declare is usually treated as a separate concern from the matter itself.

Conflict of interest

Any personal, financial or other interest that could influence, or appear to influence, a professional judgement. The expectation is to declare it and manage it, not simply to feel unaffected by it.

Insight

Understanding what went wrong, why it happened, and the effect it had on patients, colleagues and public confidence. In a probity case it means acknowledging the conduct without qualifying it.

Remediation

The concrete steps taken so the same thing does not happen again — training, supervision, changes to how you work — together with evidence that they happened and have been sustained.

Qualified admission

An acknowledgement offered with a justification attached — “I accept it looked that way, but…” — that reads to a panel as a defence rather than insight. See “Why a Probity Response Has to Be Written Differently” above.

Contemporaneous note

An entry made at the time or as soon as possible afterwards — the clearest evidence against a records-based probity concern, and why a correction made later has to be clearly identified as such rather than blended in.

Restoration to a register

The route back for someone who has been removed from, or has come off, a register. Evidence of what you've done in the meantime sits at the heart of the application.

Verifiable CPD

CPD with evidence of completion you can keep with your CPD record. This course is certified and self-directed.

Claims, declarations, undisclosed interests and financial conduct that has been questioned — the closest pairing to this course.

Being open when something has gone wrong — the failure that most often turns into a probity allegation.

Records, corrections and retrospective entries: where most probity cases actually begin.

What fitness to practise means, how the process works, and what is being assessed at each stage.