A model for planning continuing education for impact

This article reviews the current status of planning and evaluating continuing education (CE) activities for health care professionals. It also acknowledges the increasing demands for accountability of CE. After identifying attributes of most current CE planning strategies and the assumptions underlying them, the article proposes a new system for planning CE that calls for reorientation from the traditional method of planning. This reorientation suggests a problem orientation in programming that requires assessing needs in terms of patient care data, organizing activities around the problem as a focus rather than a health care discipline, committing resources to eliminating the needs regardless of the number of interventions required, and evaluating in terms of impact on indicators used to identify needs. This planning strategy purports to increase the probability of having a measurable impact on health care.