In July 2025, we invited thousands of pharmacists around the Commonwealth to join us in testing our brand new CPA Academy Platform as part of the celebrations of the launch of the CPA Academy – the Commonwealth Pharmacists Association’s new empowerment hub. Since then, thousands of pharmacists have helped us trial different bits of the Academy’s digital offer, and we’re grateful to each and every one of you.
The CPA team have put a lot of hard work into the building of our new platform and we’re continuing to make improvements every month to our digital learning offer. However, like with any new technology launch, users have helped us identify a few technical problems that we’ve been busy working on for the last couple of weeks. We’d like to take this opportunity to update you on some of the work we’ve done as the Academy Platform exits the testing phase and becomes permanently available to pharmacists around the world.
Dealing with broken content in our older courses
Unfortunately, user testing of our older e-courses has highlighted to us that a sizeable number of links and assets are no longer working the way that they should be. Our investigation has revealed that the vast majority of this breakage is the result of cuts to USAID – websites and platforms that were being funded by United States aid programmes no longer exist, or have had their content migrated to other locations. In many cases these assets are a vital part of a course.
Like many global health organisations we are wrestling with the impact of USAID cuts on our services and programmes, and we regret that these cuts have impacted some of our courses. We are undertaking a full audit of our e-courses and working to remove, replace or rework content that depended on USAID. This is a top priority for the CPA Academy Team.
To avoid undermining anyone’s learning journey, we are taking down our courses as we we work our way through them. Right now there are three courses available on the platform. By mid September we expect to have all of them back online, and by mid October, we’ll have all of courses ready – with brand new ones joining the platform later this year as well.
To avoid undermining anyone’s learning journey, we are taking down our courses as we we work our way through them. Right now there are three courses available on the platform. By mid September we expect to have all of them back online, and by mid October, we’ll have all of courses ready – with brand new ones joining the platform later this year as well.
Improved registration process
A minority of users trying to create an Academy account have encountered issues with their upgrade to Premium status failing to activate with our automated registration process. If you are one of the users impacted by this problem, you should have now been given full access to the platform – please contact us if you have any issues.
To manage this issue moving forward, we are implementing an alternative two stage registration process. Now, all users sign up for a free account, and then need to upgrade to Premium either by paying their £20 subscription fee or using an activation link for complimentary membership from their National Pharmacy Association (NPA).
You can setup your free account by visiting our new registration link.