CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

To endorse and promote the concept of continuing professional development (CPD), which involves personal self-appraisal, educational plan development, plan implementation, documentation, and evaluation; further,

To continue the development of a variety of mechanisms and tools that pharmacists can use to assess their CPD needs; further,

To encourage individual pharmacists to embrace CPD as a means of maintaining their own professional competence; further,

To encourage pharmacy managers to promote CPD as the model for ensuring the competence of their staff; further,

To collaborate with other pharmacy organizations, state boards of pharmacy, accrediting bodies, and regulatory bodies in the development of effective methods for implementing CPD; further,

To strongly support objective assessment of the impact of CPD on pharmacist competence; further,

To endorse the efforts of colleges of pharmacy and ASHP-accredited pharmacy residency programs to teach the principles, concepts, and skills of CPD.

Rationale

Maintaining competence throughout one’s career is part of a professional’s obligation. Traditionally, this has been done through continuing education (CE) activities, but CE has several shortcomings. There is often no mechanism to ensure that CE is effective, since most CE activities have no summative evaluation component. (Summative evaluation takes place at the completion of a program to determine whether goals and objectives have been met.) In addition, CE programs are not usually curricular, are not always competency-directed, and tend to be content-oriented rather than skill-based. There is little evidence that CE changes practice or has an impact on patient outcomes.

Continuing professional development (CPD) is a model that addresses many of the shortcomings of the CE model. CPD differs from CE in that it is ongoing and includes the entire scope of an individual’s practice, it is often undertaken in partnership with the professional’s employer, it is practitioner-centered and self-directed, and it is intended to be outcomes-oriented. Many pharmacy professionals already assume responsibility for their professional growth and development by reflecting on their practice, recognizing needs, and seeking educational opportunities and activities that will meet those needs. Even when these activities are not documented or reported, this process incorporates many of the principles of CPD. 

CPD is a cyclical, five-step process that begins with a self-appraisal by the individual professional to determine educational needs and progresses through the development of a personal plan to meet those needs, an action phase in which the professional participates in the activities identified in the personal plan, a documentation component in which the professional keeps records of all CPD activities in which he or she participates, and an evaluation phase to determine whether the CPD needs were met, if practice has been improved, if patients have benefited, and if learning was or was not accomplished (and why). This step then feeds back into the self-appraisal stage and the cycle continues.

In the self-appraisal phase, identification of CPD needs may be accomplished through personal assessment, performance review by a manager or supervisor, an audit exercise undertaken with other professionals, or as a requirement of a professional organization or regulatory body. There are a variety of mechanisms that pharmacists can use to self-assess their CPD needs. Self-assessment is not a skill most professionals learn during their professional education and training, however. For CPD to be effective, professionals must learn this skill before entering the CPD cycle, in colleges of pharmacy and residency programs. 

In the next phase, the personal plan, the professional identifies resources and actions to meet the identified CPD needs. Activities may be informal, such as study clubs, observation of a colleague’s practice, and conversations with colleagues, or they may be more formal, such as CE workshops, short courses, seminars, self-study programs, or graduate-level course work.

Whether formal or informal, managed CPD requires the documentation of participation in these activities. This documentation becomes the foundation of the professional’s CPD portfolio. Documentation of participation in formal activities is usually given by the provider, but more informal and self-directed activities, such as observation of a colleague’s practice, require the individual to establish a format for documentation in the portfolio. 

In the final phase, which feeds back into self-appraisal, the professional self-evaluates, is evaluated by a manager or supervisor, enlists the aid of peers, or is evaluated by an external (e.g., regulatory) body. It is important in this phase to determine whether learning was or was not accomplished (and if not, why not) and to feed this back into the ongoing CPD cycle.