CME Congress 2012: Improving Today's CME and Looking Toward the Future of CEHP

Abstract

The continuing medical education (CME) community convenes a congress at roughly four-year intervals to highlight research conducted since the last gathering and consider issues that are likely to hold the attention of the community until the next gathering. The most recent meeting, CME Congress 2012, was held in Toronto last spring and was organized around 5 themes: patient safety and quality, interprofessional education, medical education simulation, optimizing learning, and assessment of clinicians.I was honored that the organizers of the congress, Gabrielle Kane and Ivan Silver, asked me to make closing remarks during the final plenary session. They suggested that my comments should encourage participants to reflect further on what they had learned during the meeting, inquire deeply into how they can use what they have learned, and consider novel ways to take advantage of facilitating factors and address barriers in the settings into which they hoped to introduce their new learnings. In other words, they wanted me to help the participants think about a personal strategy to transfer what they had learned into their work settings. In this commentary, I will summarize my closing remarks and, because I have had time to reflect, elaborate on important learning points in each of the theme areas and identify important issues related to transfer of learning to the practice of CME. Although there were many excellent sessions, it would not have been possible to comment on all of them; for

Roads less traveled: understanding the “why” in simulation as an integrated continuing professional development activity

“…Despite significant advances in educational simulation, the scientific simulation community has been slow to produce evidence for why practitioners appear to be reserved in selecting simulation as a CPD activity. While some have discussed how simulation has been underutilized in CPD [20, 21], the focus in the simulation community remains largely at the level of utility and educational mechanisms. These have included, for example, the effects of developmental strategies [22, 23], comparing effectiveness of simulation designs [24], promoting effective simulations [25–29], links to maintenance of certification [30, 31], consideration of simulation to assess performance or gaps [32], improving quality of systems of care [33, 34], clinician perspectives on changes to knowledge skills and attitudes [33, 35], and simulation uses in CPD [36, 37].…”