Benefits of Continuing Medical Education?

What are the benefits of Continuing Medical Education?

CME improves physician performance AND patient health outcomes – so finds a recent synthesis of systematic reviews.

The synthesis also reports that CME has a more reliably positive impact on physician performance than on patient health outcomes

Given the pressures on time, and an apparently wide choice of types of learning opportunity, it’s perhaps worth bearing in mind the characteristics of CME activities that lead to more positive outcomes. These are:-

– activities that are more interactive
– use more methods
– involve multiple exposures
– are longer
– focus on outcomes that are considered important by physicians

These are the findings of Cervero and Gaines who looked at 8 systematic reviews of CME effectiveness (2003 onwards).

Reference
Cervero RM and Gaines JK. “The impact of CME on physician performance and patient health outcomes: an updated synthesis of systematic reviews.” J Contin Educ Health Prof. 2015 Spring; 35(2):131-8. Abstract: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26115113