Writing Articles on Continuing Medical Education for Medical Journals

Sharing of knowledge through Continuing Medical Education (CME) contribute immensely to professional development of skills in clinical medical practice. Thus, the writing of CME articles should adopt an approach that addresses the needs of the readers by attempting to fill gaps in their knowledge, skills, and ethics about clinical care. As such CME articles should be comprehensive and focused on specific areas. The specific learning outcomes should be well defined. In designing and development of such articles, pedagogic principles are to be borne in mind. In this article we outline a guide to writing a CME article, incorporating both the principles of instructional design and directed selflearning. The ideal CME articles will transit through multimedia-enhanced interactive online learning, with greater use of connectivity through the internet. Synchronous and asynchronous learning is in greater need, as distance and online learning are increasingly popular. Authors of CME articles will need to eventually design CME articles to be interactive, enriched with multimedia to engage their readers. Lesson plans employing instructional design principles should aim to promote both instructions for learning and formative assessment ensuring learning have taken place, and outcomes have been achieved. This article describes on how to write effective CME articles for medical journals.