CEPD is bidding a fond farewell to Education Consultant, Accreditation, Jessica Black, who has accepted a new position as the CPD Accreditation Manager at The College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC). In her role here, she advised directors of continuing education and faculty members in the design, planning, development, accreditation and evaluation of specific CE activities. Her previous experience as an event planner gave her a unique perspective on the development of continuing education programs and it helped her become a well-rounded member of our Accreditation department. Today marks the end of nine years as part of the CEPD team for Jessica and she will be greatly missed. “We look forward to continued collaborations with the CFPC,” says Susan Rock, Director of CEPD.

CEPD’s Director of Global and Indigenous Health, Dr. Anna Banerji, visited Ethiopia this month as part of a University of Toronto needs assessment venture. Here she shares her experience visiting with Continuing Education (CE) in mind.

“I had the pleasure of accompanying Dr. Claire Pain, five psychiatrists, and one psychiatry resident for a needs assessment for educational activities as part of the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration (TAAAC). Dr. Amy Bender who is with U of T’s Faculty of Nursing was working on expanding capacity in Nursing as well.

We met with the Associate Director for the Graduate Program, the Dean of Nursing, Associate Dean of Medicine, and the Dean of Pediatrics. The Dean of Nursing signed an agreement with U of T, Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), and the TAAC program for nursing CE based around critical care nursing and the development of a graduate program of nursing.

I spoke to the Chief of Pediatrics and they described their CE needs and the needs of specific sub-specialty programs. They have a comprehensive model, which includes collaborations with external universities, such as U of T, to train Ethiopian sub-specialists. Once they have two or three subspecialists trained in a particular specialty they are able to create their own involved subspecialty program.

We also had a meeting with Nana Osei from CUSO, who is the Ethiopian representative and lives in Ottawa. He is very interested in discussing collaboration on maternal child health in program development, and CE for nurses and physicians.

It was exciting and inspiring to meet many people who not only have vision, but have been able to implement educational activities in Ethiopia. Knowledge gained from studying this framework and model could potentially be applied to other parts of the world.”

CEPD is gaining national and international recognition for its innovative programing. Medical Record-Keeping, Safe Opioid Prescribing, and Practice Skills in Primary Care are three series of courses that have been developed in-house and are achieving prominence.

Medical Record-Keeping is a one-day interactive workshop that is recognized by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO). Its primary goal is to help educate participants on how to navigate the CPSO’s new Record Keeping policy to maintain medical records to ensure quality, continuity, assessment, and evidence of care. This program, along with Practice Skills in Primary Care sessions, will be included in the Family Medicine Forum in Vancouver, B.C., November 7-9, 2013.

CEPD wanted to create targeted programing for doctors specifically looking for a practice skills refresher. The outcome was the six courses of Practice Skills in Primary Care, which focuses on the CanMeds Roles of Communicator, Collaborator, and Professional. The program is made up of 6 day-long small group, interactive workshops participants can choose from: Patient Centred Communication, Challenging Communication, Clinical Collaboration, Professionalism and Ethics, Web-based Resources for Practice, and Creating Change in Clinical Practice. This was created as an alternative to the Comprehensive Family Practice Review, which covered five three-day weekends.

“CEPD is committed to supporting physicians working in primary care to provide the best care for their patients, families and communities,” says Dr. Kate Hodgson, CEPD’s Education Consultant involved with the development of these programs.

Starting in January 2014, Safe Opioid Prescribing will be taught in a blended learning format including three modules offered via webinar for learners who live further afield and find it challenging to reach the Greater Toronto Area followed by one interactive workshop. It was created to help physicians focus their expertise in the field of complex pain management and safe prescribing to address the dangers of opioid misuse and abuse.

“We are very excited to use innovative web-based educational technology to provide resources and outreach for physicians across Ontario who are working to keep their communities safe,” says Alex Snukal, CEPD’s Information Services Coordinator who is providing technical assistance for these programs.

CEPD Director of Research, Dr. Simon Kitto will be presenting today, Monday, September 16th, at the University of Leicester (UofL), UK in a workshop that is bringing together all UofL Interprofessional Education (IPE) leads.

“I’m pleased to be presenting at such a reputable institution,” Dr. Kitto says. “I will be emphasising the importance of theoretically and empirically informed IPE design and practice using examples from workplace-based analyses of factors affecting the conditions of possibility for IPC to happen appropriately and effectively.”

 Dr. Kitto’s morning presentation is focused on:

• the importance of IPE in reorganizing healthcare practices and improving the quality of patient care,
• the need to understand the conditions of the healthcare system when designing IPE.

The overarching aims of the morning agenda are:

• to re-energize the IPE leads from each discipline as well as others who have supported the teaching for some time.
• to ensure alignment between IPE teaching and core profession-specific teaching by asking the two questions: “Why do we do this work?”  and “What is the added value of being interprofessional?”
• to consider a Portfolio of IPE Assessment and research while involving students in educational design and teaching.

The overarching aim of the afternoon agenda is:

• to consider this the first teaching event and how attendees can maximize learning,
• to improve teaching quality for this first teaching event,
• to consider the integration of social and psychological theories on how people work in teams.

 Dr. Kitto will address sociological theories relating to IPE, while drawing on his own work to highlight the importance of healthcare students’ learning not only within the classroom, but also within the clinical context.

Connect with Dr. Kitto via Twitter, LinkedIn, or email at simon@cepdtoronto.ca.

CEPD is now gathering nominations for the Fall 2013 Continuing Education Research and Development Internal Grants. Since 1997, these grants have been offered three times per year to support projects (up to $5,000.00) that relate to the planning, implementation, delivery and evaluation of continuing education for healthcare professionals. For example, needs assessment and methods of evaluation to measure the impact of continuing education activities on health professional competence or behaviour.

“These grants are important because they provide seed funding for research projects in the community,” says Vashty Hawkins, a CEPD administrator who has been involved with the grants process since 2004.

Please visit http://www.cepd.utoronto.ca/internal-grants/ for a downloadable application form, deadline guidelines, and criteria, or contact Vashty Hawkins at vashty.hawkins@utoronto.ca. The deadline for the fall cycle nominations is Friday, September 20, 2013 at 5:00pm.

CEPD events start with great ideas and enthusiastic faculty. But every great idea needs to be reviewed to ensure educational integrity and to ensure that participants are eligible for credits for the time they spend learning. That is part of what happens during the process called Accreditation.

Accreditation is one of the important first steps towards holding any event. It can be somewhat involved and time-consuming for the first-time event director.

But don’t worry because Accreditation Coordinator Karma Farah, and Education Consultant- Accreditation Jessica Black, are here to help. They will work with you to realize your goal of creating innovative, original programming that will be educationally sound and improve patient outcomes.

Here are Karma’s and Jessica’s top five tips to keep in mind when going through the Accreditation process to ensure a successful peer review:

1. Be aware of time. Timelines are very important in the accreditation process. It is advised that you apply a minimum of 8-10 weeks ahead of the event start date, or 3-4 weeks before your advertising deadline, to ensure that the peer review of the event is finalized.

2. The more the merrier. Multiple commercial sponsorship is highly recommended over single sponsorship to avoid the potential perception of bias in your program. CEPD follows a commercial sponsorship policy for all events. Click here to view the policy on our website.

3. Manage conflict. Faculty are expected to disclose relevant relationships with industry for a period of 5 years prior to a course. The College of Family Physicians of Canada has also instituted a new process regarding mitigation of Conflict of Interest.  If your application includes a request for Mainpro-M1 credits we will help you navigate through the new guidelines and disclosure slide requirements.

4. Learn from the past. If you have an evaluation summary from a previous event it can act as a valuable needs assessment tool for the future iteration of your meeting. We will provide you with guidance on how you can best utilize this feedback during the application process.

5. Participation starts with participants. All accredited events must include a minimum of 25% interactivity within the body of the program. Interactivity can take the form of question and answer periods, workshops, role-playing, the use of audience response systems, or small group discussions.  It is important when submitting a program for review that the elements of interactivity are clearly identified on the program and are also obvious to the participants in the program.  We can provide you with tips on how to work interactive and engaging elements into your program. Click here to read more.

To learn more about accreditation at CEPD, click here.

Since starting my time here as Vice Dean, I have furthered CEPD’s business development and have developed an annual formal academic business plan. Two long-term goals of these plans are to foster growth and to increase engagement with all departments in the Faculty of Medicine.

A book I found at a Harvard bookstore called Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur helped inspire me while developing our academic business plans.  As academics, business language and strategy can sometimes be very foreign to us. This book takes powerful strategic ideas and helps you to apply them in a straightforward manner to your particular context. Among other methodologies, it details nine building blocks that, when fully completed, allow an organization to clearly define its business plan.

Here are the nine building blocks and a brief note about how we have defined them here at CPD:

1. Customer segments – whom we aim to serve. Our customer segments are health professionals and the local and international medical community. In other words, you.
2. Value propositions – what we can do to fill a customer’s needs. See a full listing here.
3. Channels – how we distribute value. View our channels here.
4. Customer relationships – how we work together to maintain clients. Our dedicated staff of event planners, registration coordinators, education consultants, and on-site staff work hard to ensure that events are executed flawlessly and provide exceptional educational value. This keeps learners coming back for more.
5. Revenue streams – how our value propositions generate excess revenue over expense. CPD, and ultimately Departmental, revenue streams are supported by the health professionals that return to learn with each Department through CEPD year after year and that appreciate our faculty content experts and CEPD’s knowledgeable staff, who are our best key resource.
6. Key resources – the assets we have to implement our value. Our accreditation and event management teams, in coordination with course directors and faculty members, create and offer some of the world’s leading CPD programs.
7. Key activities – what we do with our resources that make us stand out. Thanks to our key activities of CE and Research, we are important and strategic partners in the transformation of health care in Ontario and beyond.
8. Key partnerships – the relationships we cultivate with other academic and professional organizations, and the private sector. We are partners with leading experts in education, medicine, research, and technology. This synergy makes our educational products and services innovative and powerful learning experiences for health practitioners.
9. Cost structure – the expenses we incur doing business. Our cost structure is lean and competitive.

Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions you may have.

Email: dimitri.anastakis@utoronto.ca

Twitter: @DAnastakis

LinkedIn: http://cpd.io/13zUFEw

Director of CEPD Research, Dr. Simon Kitto (@DrSimonKitto), and Research Associate and graduate student Joanne Goldman, will be involved in the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference this week in Prague, Czech Republic.

Dr. Kitto will be a part of a pre-conference workshop on Sunday, August 25th entitled “Using theory in medical education research”. The goal of this workshop is to make participants aware of the necessity of knowing and applying theories in medical education research by introducing them to sociological, cognitive psychological, and sociocultural theories. It will also demonstrate how these theories can be used in designing medical education research. Renée Stalmeijer from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and Tina Martimianakis from The Wilson Centre and Sick Kids Hospital will be running this workshop along with Dr. Kitto.

Joanne Goldman will be one of an international group of facilitators participating in the Essential Skills in Continuing Education and Professional Development (ESCEPD) course organized by Maria Bystrin, Lee Manchul, Susan Rock (@SusanGRock) , and Jane Tipping from the Faculties of Medicine and Pharmacy, University of Toronto. The aim of this new course is to provide participants with a global appreciation of current Best Practices in CE, the evidence and theory of informing effective CEPD, and practical approaches for implementing CEPD within a variety of settings. Joanne will be facilitating a session with Ronald McVicar and Ivan Silver on a systems perspective of CEPD, positioning it alongside the fields of quality improvement and patient safety.

Joanne will also be presenting her PhD work on Tuesday, August 27th, entitled “An ethnography of interprofessionalism in discharge in general internal medicine: implications for continuing interprofessional education”. The key message concerns how interprofessional continuing education programs need to address the structural factors that shape interprofessional interactions in discharge to improve discharge processes.

The annual AMEE conference is a significant meeting for those working in healthcare professions education. Providing an opportunity to present new work and network with international colleagues, the conference is geared towards teachers, educationists, researchers, administrators, and students.

Building on strategic directions to advance research, innovation and scholarship in Continuing Education, foster and imbed quality improvement (QI) and further develop Continuing Interprofessional Education (CIPE), CEPD’s Research division has embarked on a rapid expansion. Led by Director, Dr. Simon Kitto, CEPD Research has recruited five new members over the past academic year. Please join us in welcoming Elizabeth, Rachel, Natasha, Eman and Sarah who bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the team along with existing members Joanne Goldman (Research Associate) and Laure Perrier (Information Specialist).

Elizabeth Cadavid is an Administrative Assistant to Dr. Simon Kitto and also provides centralized administrative support to other members of the Research team. She is a graduate of CDI College’s Medical Office Administrator Program and was the Office Manager at Yonge Finch Chiropractic & Health Centre where she worked on business financial accounts, managed patient files, and processed functional abilities evaluations and workers’ compensation and motor vehicle accidents reports, before joining CEPD. Elizabeth’s responsibilities include scheduling and organizing meetings, making travel arrangements and compiling research information for accreditation and annual reports.

 

Rachel E. Grant, RN, BScN, MN, is a Research Associate at CEPD. Upon graduating from Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, Rachel relocated to Toronto to commence graduate studies at Ryerson University. She is the recipient of Ryerson’s 2013 Master of Nursing Writing and Faculty of Community Services Dean’s Graduate Essay Writing awards for her paper on “Improving Healthcare through Social Media in Northern and Rural Communities.” Four years of experience in an educator role within undergraduate nursing programs and a Master of Nursing in Leadership in Education and Health Policy give her a theoretical and practical understanding of health sciences education. Additionally, Rachel’s experiences bring a clinician, family-centered care, and pan-Canadian perspective to the CEPD Research team. Her research interests include interprofessional education, professional power, and the history of nursing.

Natasha Kachan, MEd, is a Research Coordinator at CEPD. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in education. Since 2000, Natasha has worked in the Faculties of Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, coordinating research on topics ranging from interprofessional communication in the OR to integrating complementary and alternative medicine modalities into hospital settings. Natasha’s primary interests are qualitative research methods and design and innovation in qualitative data analysis. She is very excited to be working with the highly diverse, multidisciplinary group of researchers that make up the research arm of CEPD.

 

Eman Leung, PhD, PMP, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, IHI Improvement Advisor     Dr. Leung is a Quality Improvement Scientist and the Associate Director of Research at CEPD. He is an applied psychologist, with an advanced training in statistical modelling, psychometrics, social epidemiology, and naturalistic verbal and non-verbal behavioural observations. He developed an interest in integrating research and practices while he was a CIHR NET New Emerging Scientist, and since then has been working with acute care hospital, long-term care facilities, social services, mental health centres and not-for-profit organizations to improve care quality through knowledge translation. At CEPD, Dr. Leung has the dual role of advancing the scholarship of Continuing Education (CE), Quality Improvement (QI) and Knowledge Translation (KT), while improving the quality of services offered by CEPD and its clients with advances in CE, QI and KT research. His research focuses on 1) identifying the perceived and unperceived CE needs by triangulating quantitative and qualitative data from multiple sources; and 2) examining the improvement of patient safety outcomes resulting from the implementation of a patient and family-centered interprofessional model of care at TGH, Sickkids and CAMH that integrates CE, QI and KT.

Sarah McMillan, BA (Hons.), MA, is a Research Associate at CEPD. She is a graduate of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, and holds a Master of Arts in Sociology with a background in the critical analyses of health, illness, medicine and disability. Some of her research interests include Patient and Family Centred Care (PFCC), patient experience/satisfaction, the use of illness narratives in clinical practice, interprofessional collaboration and medical education. Her current projects centre on integrating the patient and family perspective into health research. Additionally, Sarah has experience with patient advocacy and education through her involvement with health related organizations in the community and her own lived experience.  She is passionate about incorporating this knowledge into her work.