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.
