Continuing medical education is a way of ensuring health professionals across a range of disciplines maintain their skills and keep up-to-date with latest techniques, guidelines and policies. Through continuing professional development, they can be better equipped to meet the needs of patients and the health service.
It also ensures their own professional development moves forward in a way that maintains personal job satisfaction and an improving skill mix. The process of continual learning can be rewarding in that it includes the ongoing acquisition of new knowledge, skills and attitudes to enable a health professional to practise competently, efficiently and effectively.
Today, there is no particular division between continuing medical education (CME) and continuing professional development (CPD) as the two are now leading towards the same objectives. Over the past decade continuing medical education has come to include managerial, social and personal skills and has evolved to take on topics that may seem beyond the traditional clinical medical subjects.
The term continuing professional development acknowledges not only the wide ranging competences needed to practise high quality medicine but also the multidisciplinary context of patient care. It also refers to the postgraduate educational activities physicians are expected to undertake in order to ensure that they remain up-to-date in their field and continue to develop and enhance the knowledge and skills required to be successful at work.
The learning activities can come through a number of forums and may take place as live events, written publications, online programmes, audio, video, or other electronic media. For a GP, this can range from self-facilitated clinical meetings within the practice to university provision of master classes.
The General Medical Council (GMC) regards CME/CPD an on-going learning process that allows doctors to demonstrate that they are maintaining their skills in their practice, while helping them to develop professionally and to learn from more informal experiences that are not part of licensing processes.
It publishes Guidance on CPD, which sets out the principles on which continuous professional development should be based, and the roles of the relevant organisations involved in its delivery.
The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), for example, offers members a range of CPD support through the provision of courses and conferences and through partnership institutions such as universities via distance learning programmes.
The college also provides specialist skills modules such as the Certificate in Drugs Misuse, minor surgery courses, RCGP Leadership Course and self-assessment tools such as Phased Evaluation Programme. But there are also specific areas that continuing medical education can cover, enabling a GP to develop an interest in a particular area or specialise.
Some of these specific learning modules available include areas such as anaesthesia and pain management, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disorders, communication, diabetes, dermatology, epilepsy, ethics and law, hypertension, oral health, palliative care, psychiatric disorders, public health, sexual health, sleep disorders, sports medicine, men’s health and working with colleagues.
Under revalidation, due to be introduced in 2011, GPs will need to be relicensed. In order to relicense, doctors will need to collect a folder of information about their practice. This will include information about appraisal, audit, and patient and colleague feedback. Continuing medical education and CPD will also be part of that.
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