What the changes to GPhC revalidation actually mean for you
Every year, when you renew your registration, the GPhC asks for four CPD records, one peer discussion and one reflective account. Most pharmacists I speak to are fairly comfortable with the CPD entries. It is the reflective account that tends to cause the most stress, and from January this year, something changed about how you can approach it.
Until the end of 2025, your reflective account had to be built around one or more of three standards the GPhC chose each year, the same three for everyone. From 1 January 2026, you can base it on any of the nine standards for pharmacy professionals, whichever one actually reflects something real that happened in your practice over the past twelve months. That is a genuinely useful change. It means you are no longer trying to force a reflection to fit a standard that might have nothing to do with what actually challenged you that year.
The requirement itself has not changed. You still need a real example, connected honestly to a standard, with a clear sense of how it benefited the people in your care, not a theoretical exercise. You still should not name your workplace directly. And the CPD entries still need at least two to be planned learning, not just things that happened to come up (unplanned learning).
What I think is worth saying, from the inspection side of this rather than the revalidation side, is that the same instinct that makes a good reflective account also makes a good inspection response. Both come down to the same question: can you show, with a real example, that you actually understood something and did something differently because of it. A vague reflection reads the same way to a reviewer as a vague answer to an inspector's question. The specifics are what carry weight, not the polish of the writing. Also important to note as well, is that this record is not just a paperwork exercise, it provides a genuinely good evidence base for competency journey should you need to evidence this in the future.
If you are working through your revalidation this year and want a proper grounding in the standards themselves, rather than just picking one and hoping it fits, that is exactly the kind of thing the premises standards course is built to support. It comes with a self-audit tool and a completion certificate you can use, and for anyone whose reflective account this year touches on premises, governance or inspection readiness, it gives you something concrete to reflect against rather than starting from a blank page.
