Short courses and professional development

Find out more about some of these courses on offer and don’t hesitate to get in touch via email to ddi.hsc.talent@ed.ac.uk if you want to know more.

Postgraduate Professional Development (PPD)

Postgraduate Professional Development (PPD) is aimed at working professionals who want to advance their knowledge through a flexible postgraduate-level course(s), without the time or financial commitment of a full Masters, Postgraduate Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate.

It is possible to take some of the courses that make up our various Masters, Postgraduate Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate programmes as stand-alone PPD courses.

You may take a maximum of 50 credits worth of courses over two years through our PPD scheme. These lead to a University of Edinburgh postgraduate award of academic credit. Alternatively, after one year of taking courses you can choose to transfer your credits and continue on to studying towards a higher award on a Masters, Postgraduate Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate programme.

Although PPD courses have various start dates throughout a year, you may only start a Masters, Postgraduate Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate programme in the month of September. Any time spent studying PPD will be deducted from the amount of time you will have left to complete a Masters, Postgraduate Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate programme.

Tuition fees

If you choose to study through the Postgraduate Professional Development route, you pay your tuition fees on a course-by-course basis.

Find a full list of our PPD courses and how to apply on the Health and Social Care Talent Programme website

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

We offer a range of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunities to support the health and social care workforce to design, deliver, evaluate and improve high-quality, person-centred care for citizens and service users. Our courses are flexible and available to start at any point in the year.

CPD courses are stand-alone courses that are not part of a degree. They may or may not offer university credit.

Learners won’t need to put in a formal application through the University of Edinburgh's online system, although the course might require them to make some kind of application.

Find out more about CPD courses offered by our Health and Social Care Talent Programme

Other short courses

In addition to the more formal professional development courses, we also offer some short courses that may be of interest to wider public audiences.

For example our Forensic Medicine and Science course - an introductory 32 week night class which aims to explore the basic elements of medicine, science and law as applied to the investigation of death and crime and its application to the court law.