Balance
Registration Renewal Requirement 2022
The Renewal Period for 2022 began February 24 and ends March 31, 2022, providing registrants with more than 4 weeks in which to renew current registration. This applies equally to new registrants, that is, those who may have been registered for less than one year as of March 31. All registrations expire on March 31, 2022.
Please ensure you complete the online renewal form and provide payment on or before March 31, 2022, to ensure your registration is renewed. Failure to renew your registration(s) on or before 11:59pm on March 31, 2022, will result in immediate cancellation of your licence on April 1, 2022, meaning that you will be required to stop practicing TCM/A at that time and will have to apply for reinstatement. Reinstatement following non-payment of fees pays a reinstatement fee in an amount equal to 35% of the annual registration renewal fee according to Bylaw s. 59.
It’s a good idea to check now and ensure that you will be able to meet all requirements for registration renewal. Also, plan to complete your registration renewal online, as early as possible to receive confirmation of renewal before your registration expires. If for any reason you are not able to renew your registration by 11:59pm March 31, 2022, your practice could be negatively affected.
Detailed information is available on the Registration Renewal page on the College website.
While you’re renewing your registration….
Take the opportunity to check that all your contact information is up to date. According to Bylaw s. 60, registrants are required to keep their contact information current by immediately notifying the College of changes.
“Notification of change of registration information
A registrant must immediately notify the registrar of any change of address, name or any other registration information previously provided to the registrar”
What if you plan to cancel your Full Practising or Non-Practising Registration?
If you plan to cancel your registration after April 1, 2022, please complete a “Registration Cancellation Request Form for Full or Non-Practising Registrant”.
Please also consult the “Closing Practice / Leaving / Resignation” section of the Practice Standard – Clinical Record Keeping , page 8. This will help you to responsibly notify patients and advise you regarding the transferring and retaining of records.

Practice Support Program Update and Refresher
Almost 600 registrants tested the Self-Reflective Assessment Tool, Stage 1, and most went on to complete a follow-up survey.
We then invited Stage 1 participants to use their results to draw up a Continuing Professional Development Plan, Stage 2 of the PSP. These registrants were invited to complete a second short survey regarding the instructions provided, the usefulness of the Learning Resource Guide, and other aspects of Stage 2.
More than 250 registrants completed this second survey. We were pleased that 84% of respondents felt that sufficient information and instruction had been provided, allowing them to use their Stage 1 results to develop a Stage 2 Continuing Professional Development Plan. Most respondents prefer using templates in digital form or online, and 77% are comfortable enough with the 14 Career-span Competencies (CSCs), and the PSP framework as a whole, to develop learning objectives that are suited to them.
The survey responses and additional input provided by these registrants has been invaluable in helping the College fine-tune the PSP and we thank you!
Incorporating PSP into CE program
Our intent has always been that the PSP eventually replace the current Continuing Competency Program requirement of completing a fixed minimum of 50 CE hours in a reporting period.
We would like to let you know now that components of the Practice Support Program will be incorporated into the Continuing Competency CE Program starting in April 2022.
Registrants starting a new CE cycle in April 2022 must complete the Self-Reflective Assessment from April to August 2022, during the first 5 months of the CE cycle. In this way, registrants will be able to use the resulting assessment to plan learning activities throughout the whole CE period.
Practice Support Program Refresher
As a provincial healthcare regulator, CTCMA strives to ensure that registrants continually improve the quality of services they provide. Improved client outcomes and enhanced public safety are of paramount importance and the College recognizes and initiates related activities.
As the Practice Support Program will be mandatory, we thought it timely to provide a refresher on what it’s all about. Continuing professional development for healthcare professionals is critical. It’s also an obligation of self-regulation in BC, written right into our bylaws.
The basic concept behind the PSP is that, as you grow in your profession and develop your practice, your ability to deliver safe, effective, quality care within your chosen focus of practice will be fine-tuned. The PSP will provide you with tools and support to achieve this by promoting professional behaviour, self-evaluation, peer mentorship, and continued learning across the span of your career.
The goals are to ensure that:
patients receive safe, professional, consistent care
the public has confidence in CTCMA registrants
registrants take responsibility for learning and enhancing their own practices.
The PSP identifies 14 Career-span Competencies (CSCs), professional behaviours really, that apply to all registrants in all practice settings, from the point of entry-to-practice and onwards. It provides assessment tools (which we have been testing these last few months) to help gauge your level of performance relative to these competencies and will help focus your ongoing learning. Here are the 14 Career-span Competencies.
Act with professional integrity
Communicate effectively
Comply with legal requirements
Function in a client-centered manner
Work within areas of personal knowledge & skills
Maintain a safe work environment
Maintain comprehensive records
Maintain personal wellness consistent with needs of practice
Manage time & resources effectively
Treat others respectfully
Practice in a manner consistent with current developments in the profession
Use an evidence-informed approach in your work
Interact effectively with other professionals
Practice in a self-reflective manner
Participation in the PSP will help you identify your strengths and areas in which you may need further work, and to take responsibility for your own professional growth.
Once the PSP is fully operational as the new Continuing Competency Program, the counting of a fixed number of CEUs completed during a 2-year reporting cycle, with minimum and maximum limits in categories A, B, and C, will be discontinued. The emphasis will shift from counting specific CE hours in specific categories, to ensuring that the learning objectives are suited to individual registrants, allowing them to excel in their practices.
If you would like to take another look at the PSP video and related information, click here.

Message from the Patient Relations Committee
According to section 1 of the College Bylaws, “professional misconduct of a sexual nature” includes:
a. sexual intercourse or other forms of physical sexual relations between the registrant and the patient,
b. touching, of a sexual nature, of the patient by the registrant, or
c. behavior or remarks of a sexual nature by the registrant towards the patient,
but does not include touching, behaviour and remarks by the registrant towards the patient that are of a clinical nature appropriate to the service being provided.
There are things registrants can do to ensure that you have established and continue to maintain clear professional boundaries with your patients, including:
Introducing yourself by name and professional title, and providing a description of your role in the patient’s care.
Explaining all procedures thoroughly and obtaining informed, and/or continued, consent to treatment.
Respecting the patient’s right to withdraw consent at any time.
Refraining from entering into a close personal relationship with a former patient.
Regular review of the CTCMA Practice Standards, Code of Conduct, guidelines“(Where’s the Line”), and the Jurisprudence Handbook and/or at any time a question or potential concern arises.

Board of Directors Update
The Board of Directors provides leadership for carrying out the College’s mission, which is to serve and protect the public interest by regulating and advancing safe, ethical, and quality traditional Chinese medicine practice in British Columbia. The Board is accountable to the public through the Ministry of Health.
These three Board members, elected from among College registrants, will provide great insight and depth to the work of the College over the next three years.
The official results of the election may be viewed here.
The College’s full slate of Directors for the coming year is:
Peter Stevenson-Moore, Chair
Jennifer Jianying Gao, Vice-Chair
Guo Ding
Chang-Ming Li
Edwin Liu
Ms. Holly-Marie Page
Kimberley Schneberk
Jocelyn Stanton
Mr. Joshua Tan
Jason Tutt
Ganglin Yin
Weidong Yu
We would like to thank outgoing Board members Dr. Eyal Lebel, Ms. Rachel Ling and Ms. Beverly Osachoff for their dedicated service. Board members come from all areas of our profession, working as a team to steer College operations and ensure fiscal responsibility. These two outgoing Board members have contributed a great deal over the course of their terms.
For further information on the CTCMA Board, click here.

Great Things Award
Since 1991, iMIS has been providing non-profits, such as ourselves, with software allowing them to focus on the critical work within their mandates rather than on their technology. They offer services that assist with contact management, payment processing, fundraising, dashboard creation and many other areas.
CTCMA’s Compliance Department has been particularly successful with iMIS, moving from using Excel spreadsheets to the much more functional iMIS RiSE website tool. Here’s what CTCMA’s Compliance Administrator, Lee Riekman, had to say about RiSE:
“One of my first tasks at CTCMA was to help our compliance management team step away from Excel spreadsheets and build a RiSE website for a complaints management system. This included learning to use business objects and create IQAs through the iMIS Help Site and the iMIS Learning Subscription which were quite helpful. I really like the modularity of iParts. The iParts are like Legos. You can assemble it all together, creating a page piece by piece. I added alerts, charts to display data and, before I knew it, I had a dashboard that was very useful. I check this dashboard every morning when I start work …”
Lee expands on the benefits that the RiSE website brings to the College in this short video .
We thank Lee for his hard work on this important project!