The Faculty of Medicine’s CPD Leaders and Directors were recognized for their contribution to the field of Continuing Professional Development. Dr. Rene Wong, and Drs. Sanjeev Sockalingham, David Wiljer and their team were honoured at the Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME) conference held in May in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Dr. Rene Wong was the recipient of the Fox Award. Established in 2001, this award is given to a presenting author of an original research project that links theory, methodical rigor and makes an important contribution to CPD literature. Using a theoretic lens that encompassed issues of power and hierarchies, Dr. Wong’s research examined how CPD may be having unintentional effects including: obscuring the patient voice, creating and reinforcing hierarchies between specialists and generalists, and decreasing the perceived value of continuing education. “My interest in CPD research stemmed from my experiences as a course director” said Wong,” During one of my diabetes courses targeted to family physicians, I started to question why it was that I, as a specialist, had the expertise to be able to teach an entirely different type of physician how to best practice in their local setting. I noticed the literature tended to focus on findings ways to make CPD better at increasing provider adherence to clinical practice guidelines, but no one had examined how CPD may be having unintentional effects on how clinicians interact with each other and patients”.
Drs. Sockalingam and Wiljer and their team were all awarded the Phil R. Manning Research Award in Continuing Medical Education for their project Data and Lifelong learning (LLL): Understanding Cultural Barriers and Facilitators to Accessing and Using Clinical Performance Data to Support Continuing Professional Development (CPD). This distinguished and highly competitive award is granted only every two years and this project was selected out of 24 submissions from across North America. This award recognizes original, scientific research related to physician and/or health professionals lifelong learning for their project. Together with their co-investigators (Walter Tavares, Maria Mylopoulos, Craig Campbell Allan Okrainec, Ivan Silver and Dave Davis), Drs. Sockalingam and Wiljer will explore the utilization of clinical data in psychiatry and surgery for practice improvement. The study will focus on cultural factors (defined as individual, organizational and systemic factors) that influence use of data to inform LLL, to promote practice change to support improvement in patient outcomes.
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a part of Post MD Education within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. CPD offers over 400 programs and conferences for health care professionals annually. Our CPD directors and leaders represent the clinical departments and educational units within the faculty of Medicine. They play a vital role in advancing lifelong learning for health profession and improving the quality of care to patients through the design and delivery of continuing education opportunities for health care professionals.
The Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME) is an international organization dedicated to the advancement of continuing medical education for the improvement of patient care. Members represent leading medical schools, academic medical centres, teaching hospitals and medical specialty societies in the United States and Canada.