Journal of European CME (10/23/23) Bridgeman, Mary Barna; Weber, Paul; Toscani, Michael; et al.

Researchers formulated a framework for continuing education (CE) activity development directed toward healthcare professional trainees to address a lack of best practices and universal guidance recommendations. They recommend that "trainees receive CE orientation as part of their onboarding, continual support from a CE development office or staff and ready access to CE committee leadership." Orientation introduces trainees to aspects of activity planning that include identifying unmet educational needs, selecting planning team members, acquiring suitable planning forms and coordinating with the CE Office, completing the Activity Planning Form for gap analysis documentation, drafting programmatic content and performing the activity itself. "A critical element of incorporating trainees into CE planning and delivery as it relates to continuous professional development is that trainees should receive feedback and evaluation results to identify the learner reaction to the educational intervention and whether the activity achieved its stated educational goals," the authors note. As with faculty, participating providers should supply appropriate mentorship and guidance while developing activity for trainees, with instruction on the expectation of adult learning principles like development of quantifiable learning objectives. The authors reviewed archived CE assessments for 69 activities held between 2016 and 2023, of which 18 were mainly crafted by fellows. They observed an overall response of 82.4% among more than 500 hours of CE for some 700 attendees. Fellow-led sessions tended to be 1.8 hours long versus 9 hours for faculty-led sessions, although attendee numbers and completed survey responses were similar. Fellow-led activities were also more likely to have offered interprofessional CE (IPCE) and virtual sessions. While the audiences' understanding of content, perception of balance and meeting expectations agreed closely between evaluation domains, faculty rated higher in perception of collaboration with other healthcare professionals and cultural competency, as did fellows in terms of freedom from bias or influence. "Overall, the high response rate and large sample of evaluations demonstrated notable similarities between activities devised by fellows and faculty among survey respondents across multiple domains and characteristics," the researchers observed. They emphasized the value of CE or IPCE providers using planning, guidance and intention when offering these activities to trainees.

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