We are excited to announce that the Continuing Professional Development team is the recipient of the 2021 Temerty Medicine ‘Pandemic Pivot Team Award’ as part of the 9th Annual Staff Impact Awards! This award is for an individual or team that launched a new initiative and/or process aimed at addressing the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Staff Impact Awards program was launched in 2013 to honour staff whose work and dedication have helped to make the Temerty Faculty of Medicine the celebrated school that it is today.
Prior to the pandemic, CPD focused on in-person programs and conferences for physician and allied health populations. The abrupt stop of in-person gatherings and need for health care professionals to focus on Covid-19 forced an immediate change to CPD’s entire approach.
In less than a month, the team developed a Covid-19 website and resource library that equipped the Temerty Faculty of Medicine Community with virtual care, wellness, ICU training, clinical and speciality specific resources, to navigate the rapidly changing landscape. The team worked with internal and external groups to support the delivery of the Covid-19 Webinar Series’, which offered 44 different webinars that provided 12,169 physicians and other health professionals with relevant content and support at the outset of the pandemic. A Covid-19 response fund was also developed to support scholarly projects.
The CPD team worked diligently to reinvent the unit as a digital conference producer, and rapidly developed in-house capacity and expertise in online program delivery. Team members worked closely with Program and Conference Directors throughout the faculty to assist in the redevelopment and shift of their CPD activities to an online environment and these efforts ensured key programming was able to continue.
We are proud to be recognized for our contribution in addressing some of the challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic and will use the skills and lessons learned over the past few years to continue with digital, hybrid and in-person CPD programming for the Temerty Faculty of Medicine Community. A sincere thank you and huge congratulations to all CPD staff members who worked together to make this possible.