CME for child psychiatrists: recommendations for learners, planners and presenters

Medical school and residency are only the beginning of a child psychiatrist's education. For the rest of her/his career, a child psychiatrist will need to learn on an ongoing basis. There will always be new understandings, new treatments, new issues to master. Child psychiatrists will always need to further their knowledge, develop new skills, and improve existing skills. For these reasons at very least, all child psychiatrists will need to participate in Continuing Medical Education (CME) activities. Many child psychiatrists will also be involved in the design and delivery of these CME activities. In both cases, understanding more about the effectiveness of CME will be important to the decisions they make.

This article itself is not a systematic review of the literature, but it will highlight some of the important findings from existing systematic reviews of the CME literature. Based on these findings, the article will make recommendations for both child psychiatrists as learners and child psychiatrists as CME presenters.

As learners, child psychiatrists need to be able to select CME activities that are most likely to lead to improvements in their practices. As planners and presenters, child psychiatrists need to design and deliver CME activities that are most likely to improve the practices of their target audiences. However, not all child psychiatrists have the time to review the CME literature in addition to reviewing the other bodies of literature relevant to their practices.

Thus, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the key findings in the CME literature, focusing on the effectiveness of CME.