Strengthening Continuing Professional Development through Active Collaboration

Continuing professional development (CPD) offerings in pulmonary and critical care medicine, such as grand rounds lectures and online trainings, are traditionally chosen on the basis of physician interest or expert opinion. The current era of rapid growth in medical innovation requires high-value education for clinicians to prevent decay of knowledge and learn new skills, with an eye to addressing performance gaps and improving clinical outcomes, rather than meeting local licensing requirements. Faculty development for CPD on how to explicitly plan and design high-value educational interventions for faculty members and measuring improvements in practice is needed. CPD courses should adhere to principles of effective adult learning, with faculty members taught to incorporate active learning strategies into multimodal, longitudinal educational interventions that are most effective in translating learning into sustained practice. CPD activities should allow time for reflection, practice, and feedback and include practical tips so that attendees can immediately apply learnings in their work setting. Providers of CPD should work with local quality improvement and implementation leaders so that CPD aligns with complex organizational needs and clinical gaps so that offerings are directed at improving clinical care at the local level. We suggest that organizations identify "just one opportunity" to develop such an intervention that addresses a local organizational priority, with buy-in from clinician educator collaborators with leadership sponsors. Organizations should further incentivize such work with local and regional scholarship opportunities that provide academic recognition for the efforts. Creative strategies may be necessary to provide resources for such high-value CPD. Regional interinstitutional learning collaboratives may be helpful in sharing infrastructure, conserving cost, sharing faculty members, and providing space and equipment to develop CPD programs that are of mutual interest to local healthcare systems. Evidence-based guidelines and implementation materials provided by national professional societies can be adapted by local CPD teams to their organizational context. Education researchers involved in these programs could pursue small grants from foundations or government agencies to help defray costs.