What should be in hospital doctors' continuing professional development?

Continuing professional development training needs for primary care doctors in central Uganda

BACKGROUND

Continuing professional development (CPD) activities relevant to medical doctors and their patients should be informed by current assessed training needs. The CPD provision is expected to improve the quality of professional practice and ethics. However, the Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners' Council still receives about 40 reports of malpractice every month.

AIM

The study aimed to describe the CPD training needs of doctors working in public primary care facilities in central Uganda.

SETTING

The district health system of central Uganda comprised 10 General Hospitals (GH) and 37 Health Center IVs (HC IVs) with a staffing norm of six and two doctors, respectively.

METHODS

This was a cross-sectional survey of 100 doctors working in public primary care facilities using the World Health Organization (WHO) Hennessy-Hicks questionnaire. Descriptive statistics of the importance, current performance, and training need of each skilled activity were calculated. Content analysis was applied to data from the open-ended questions.

RESULTS

The response rate was 91%, majority were males, 80 (87.9%) from 7 GHs and 24 HC IVs with an average age of 37.9 years. The domain with the highest CPD training need for the doctors was research and audit, with a mean score (standard deviation [s.d.]) of 1.94 (±1.69), followed by administration 1.58 (±1.61) and clinical tasks 1.28 (±1.29). The clinical tasks domain had the most suggested CPD topics.

CONCLUSION

Research and audit and clinical tasks were identified as important domains for CPD training for doctors in this setting.Contribution: The results give insight into CPD training needs of primary care doctors and guide various CPD providers.

Assessing Unperceived Learning Needs in Continuing Medical Education for Primary Care Physicians: A Scoping Review

INTRODUCTION

Assessing needs before developing continuing medical education/continuing professional development (CME/CPD) programs is a crucial step in the education process. A previous systematic literature review described a lack of objective evaluation for learning needs assessments in primary care physicians. This scoping review updates the literature on uses of objective evaluations to assess physicians' unperceived learning needs in CME/CPD. Identifying and understanding these approaches can inform the development of educational programs that are relevant to clinical practice and patient care. The study objectives were to (1) scope the literature since the last systematic review published in 1999; (2) conduct a comprehensive search for studies and reports that explore innovative tools and approaches to identify physicians' unperceived learning needs; (3) summarize, compare, and classify the identified approaches; and (4) map any gaps in the literature to identify future areas of research.

METHODS

A scoping review was used to "map" the literature on current knowledge regarding approaches to unperceived needs assessment using conceptual frameworks for planning and assessing CME/CPD activities.

RESULTS

Two prominent gaps were identified: (1) performance-based assessment strategies are highly recommended in nonresearch articles yet have low levels of implementation in published studies and (2) analysis of secondary data through patient input or environmental scanning is emphasized in grey literature implementation strategies more so than in peer-reviewed theoretical and research articles.

DISCUSSION

Future evaluations should continue to incorporate multiple strategies and focus on making unperceived needs assessments actionable by describing strategies for resource management.