Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care: Better Education, Better Patient Outcomes

Improve clinical competence and performance, deliver better health care, and enhance patient outcomes.

Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care helps you design, deliver, and evaluate evidence-based continuing education and professional development programs with the goal of keeping practitioners’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, competencies, and performance current and patient centered. Authored by key thought leaders in the field, including members of the Society of Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME), the book presents today’s most advanced thinking on how to empower clinicians to continuously improve their performance throughout their professional careers.
Organized under five critical themes and 28 essential topics, the book’s chapters start with cases describing real-world dilemmas; continue with evidence-based theories, solutions, and/or resources; and close with “future directions” and contemporary reference lists.

• Use continuing education to transform the delivery of care – with multidisciplinary guidance that draws on theoretical frameworks and evolving evidence from engineering, neuroscience, education, organization management, sociology, and psychology.
• Master techniques for maximizing educational benefits (learning, administrative, and otherwise) – from the evolution of core competencies to advances in simulation.
• Access evidence-informed techniques for providing realistic, personal needs assessments to improve health outcomes.
• Accommodate needs for education that are more flexible, efficient, effective, and accessible, with less need to travel.
• Promote evolving new competencies in clinician-patient communication and clinician cultural awareness .
• Explore methods for conducting research to measure the degree of effectiveness in professional education.

In an era of rapidly changing health systems, anyone responsible for improving health professionals’ continuing professional development is strongly encouraged to take advantage of the guidance within Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care .

Book review for Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care
"This is the right book at the right time by the right authors. Rayburn, Turco and Davis are long-time thought leaders in Continuing Medical Education and they assembled a veritable who’s who in CME/CPD innovation and scholarship as authors. The goal of the book is to address the need for better education to produce better clinical practice and improved health care outcomes by advancing meaningful scholarship and innovation in continuing education. The book is carefully researched and very well referenced: in this way it will be an invaluable resource for individuals who wish to dive deeper into the CME/Education Literature. For faculty who are just beginning to think about developing or leading CME programs, it provides a comprehensive overview of the role of CME in the continuum of Health Professions learning and as well as a succinct summary of the evolving role of CME and CPD in Health care organizations. The chapters which cover the current key topics/learning strategies in CME (e.g., simulation, communication, interprofessional education, etc.) lay an excellent ground work for individuals interested in developing a scholarly, grounded approach to teaching and evaluation in these domains. A particular strength of these chapters is that each includes an overview of the learning approach, a discussion of the relevant theoretical and conceptual frameworks and a summary of outcomes data. While the focus is CME, these chapters should be read by any health professions educator interested in developing related teaching and learning activities. The final section, “implementing and evaluating change in professional development”, will be particularly useful to CPD leaders who are working to drive change within a health care environment. The chapters include all the major domains of leadership and change management, but the CME context, examples and data presented make this a unique resource. Finally, deans and chief medical and patient safety officers may find a quick read of this book helpful to understand how and why they can and should include CPD programs and CPD leadership as an integral part of their Patient Safety/Quality Strategies. What really sets this book apart is that it is scholarly and deeply referenced yet easily readable and it should appeal to a broad audience: from junior faculty, to CPD leaders to deans and health care leaders."
Alison Whelan
Chief Medical Education Officer
Association of American Medical Colleges

May 2, 2017
“This is an important and timely book. The premise of the book is that an improved system for continuing professional development for all health professionals will lead to better patient outcomes. The editors are experienced educators who articulate a vision for continuing professional development that is workplace-based and is responsive to the macro and micro forces shaping healthcare delivery and the professions today. Expert authors provide detailed, evidence-based chapters on pedagogy, content, faculty development, assessment and the learning environment for continued professional development.

This scholarly attention to continuing professional development is long overdue. This is the part of health professional education that impacts the most health professionals for the longest time in their careers, and thus it has the greatest opportunity to improve practice and care. This work is a major contribution to the field, and it will be the standard reference for some time to come.”

George E. Thibault, MD
President
Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation


“Healthcare and education systems are undergoing a transformation unlike any we have ever experienced. The rise of new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics, the advent of precision medicine, a massive shift from solo practice to team-based care and an ever increasing focus on data driven outcomes are disrupting long held beliefs about education. It is now apparent that, while precertification programs remain important, it is the life long learning phase of one's professional career that needs the greatest attention. The new book "Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care" comes at exactly the right moment. As the editors write "much of what is designed and delivered as continuing education fails to influence or change medical practice or improve patient outcomes". That is no longer tenable, and this book contains the roadmap to move forward.

Filled with chapters by world experts on life long learning, I was powerful affected by starting at the end. Looking to the future, the closing chapter sketches a vision of education that responds to global professional shortages and health disparities, that meaningfully improves healthcare safety and quality, that reflects the collaborative and team-based nature of health care and raises the notion of learning healthcare organizations out of the abstract and into reality. Reading backward from that vision, I found all of the elements necessary to propel continuing education, professional development and life long learning from what is too often an afterthought to become the core of healthcare education and organizational development. It seems to me this transformation is urgently needed and this is the book to help us on the journey.”

Brian Hodges, Toronto May 2017