Continuing Education Program Business Rules

Continuing Education Program Business Rules Approval Date: April 2008 Review Date: March 2011 Review By: Continuing Education Program Committee 1. Purpose The Business Rules for the Continuing Education Program were initially developed to inform the process of development of the eCEP environment in 2007. In March 2008, they were reviewed in light of progress with the creation of an electronic environment for recording and certifying participation in the Continuing Education Program, and given the valuable background information, are now considered as part of the policy and procedure framework of the RACMA Continuing Education Program These Business Rules underpin the ongoing development and delivery of an online CEP recording, reporting and certification tool for RACMA Fellows and Members, and also provide guidance to the authority and accountability processes for those involved in management of the College’s Continuing Education Program (CEP). As part of the process to develop the online recording, monitoring and reporting of participation in the Continuing Education Program, it is necessary to establish a set of business rules. These rules initially guided the costing and programming work necessary to prepare the on-line system or tool, and advice received was that more comprehensive these rules are at commencement the better and more flexible will the tool once developed. 2. The eCEP Business Rules The following Business Rules have been adopted as part of the eCEP Environment of the Continuing Education Program. 1. RACMA CEP Recertification Period will be 3 years. 2. Annual CEP reporting periods will be measured in terms of calendar years. 3. Activity Measure will be measured in hours, not points. There is an option to proceed with translation to points later, e.g. from 2009. This will be reviewed when indicated. 4. The CEP requirement in relation to hours is 150 hours over 3 years, or 50 hours per year, which may be taken as an average over three years. They do not have to be evenly distributed over the three years. 5. There will be a report about participation available at any time. All reports are submittable so that they are stored in the content management system database. A Report is defined as relating to any of the following documents: · CEP Participation as measured by Certification · CEP Learning Plan (contract) (Appendix 5.1 to the CEP Manual), · CEP Annual Review Report (Appendix 5.2), · Triennial Contract Completion Certificate (Appendix 5.3) · CEP Certification for Conjoint Fellow Report (Appendix 5.4) Real-time management reports about participation rates will be available at any time and published as required. An individual Fellow or Member will want to produce a report about their participation (hours and activities) at any time, eg via an annual summary and a three year summary. The National Secretariat will want to produce the same, as well as a summary report that shows how many Fellows and Members are participating in CEP in any specified time period (this will be by hours) for key groups such as the CEP Committee. The local State/Territory/NZ CEP Coordinators will want access in order to advise or to endorse/confirm that a Fellow/Member has met their requirements The National Director Continuing Education/Recertification will want access to address certification, eg before the 3 year Certificate of Participation in the Continuing Education Program is printed on College letterhead. 6. All reports will be printable. · An individual's report is printable by the Fellow or Member. · The reports are printable by the Secretariat. Management reports should be accessible through the database. · Individual participant documents should be printable by those with authorised access. · There will be different levels of authorised access, eg for National Director CEP/R. · The report can be emailed from the content management system, but emailing the report can be avoided by having it accessible from the website. · It will also be possible to send CEP forms outside the system. · All CEP forms are accessible via the RACMA website, to the participant, the CEP coordinator, the National Director, and the RACMA Secretariat. 7. Key performance indicators can be incorporated into these “intelligent” documents and reports, eg · Endorsement of each year’s annual review of learning contract by local CEP coordinator · Endorsement of a learning plan by the local CEP coordinator · Endorsement of Completion of 3 Year cycle by CEP Coordinator, and the forwarding for approval and certification to National Director · Certification by National Director, with automatic generation of triennial certificate of participation.   (The mechanism could be triggered by a tick box completed National Director, for example). 8. All the on-line documents and pages will have the RACMA logo and identification. Reports will be verified with a RACMA authority as they are completed and signed off by the local CEP Coordinators and the National Director. It will be possible to audit the documents as a separate process, to periodically check the integrity of the system. 9. Access to the system will be password protected. However, it is absolutely essential that the National Director, local CEP Coordinators, National Secretariat and delegated others have access to all relevant documents as a condition of participation of CEP. 10. The RACMA competencies need to be explicit and tagged. Current advice is that whilst this can be consideration in the future, it cannot be before in 2009 (that is, as part of a Phase 2 eCEP task). It is noted that the RACMA/ACCRM/Queensland Health project is currently pursuing this on a shorter timeline. 11. New Zealand requirements will be explicit and will be incorporated as required (eg Clinical audit or 360 performance appraisal). The CEP manual is a dynamic document with regular updates. Any changes in requirement of the States/Territory/NZ are to be incorporated into documentation (appendices). 12. The CEP Learning Plan (Appendix 5.1 to the CEP Manual) is logged as the first part of the eCEP documentation. The CEP Learning Plan is usually authorised before activities can be logged, but this is not a requirement. It has bee agreed that it seems unnecessarily complicated to make these linear. The CEP Learning Plan will be entered straight into the system 13. Any and all relevant professional development activities undertaken can be listed. The “Activity Levels” (A, B, C, D etc) will not be activated in relation to allocation of nominal hours. This document is a guide only, and not a requirement of RACMA CEP. Fellows/Members will have full flexibility of choice and allocation in this area. An activity can be one provided by RACMA, required by RACMA or selected from another appropriate source that is not RACMA. 14. There will be no need to seek approval before listing relevant professional development activities undertaken via other Colleges. It will simply be required that they are related to medical management and the continuing professional development appropriate as part of being a Fellow/Member of RACMA. Activities of the Fellow/Member’s own choosing are eligible for listing, and do not need to be approved before being included. 15. The system will accept any activity listed. The activity log is expandable. It is up to the Fellow or Member to decide whether they wish to include additional hours and this is easily reviewed by the CEP Coordinator before endorsement. Logging additional activities may be of personal value to the participant. 16. All activities will have a simple nominated value - 1 hour = 1 hour. 17. The Fellow or Member has total discretion and responsibility to accurately record the number of hours. The Fellow and Member can allocate them using Appendix 4 and add them up very quickly when they complete Section 5.5. The system will not be set up to allocate hours, as this is not considered necessary and makes the programming unnecessarily complex. 18. There has been discussion about the concept of 3 levels/categories of CEP activities to recognise types of activity (see Appendix 4 and 5.6 (CEP Manual). At this stage, more complexity is a consideration for the future, perhaps in 2009. This could be done through modifications to Appendix 4 of the CEP manual - the list of possible CEP activities, perhaps from 2009. More complexity can be considered for addition later as the list of activities lines up more strongly with the RACMA competencies. Again this can be mediated through annual upgrades in the CEP manual. The complexity will reflect the competencies – as they are ratified – rather than other work that needs more discussion 19. Appropriate activity that relates to a RACMA competency and undertaken as part of a CEP program for another College or organisation can be counted as a relevant activity by the Fellow/Member in relation to RACMA CEP, and included within their record of activities. 20. In exceptional circumstances, some Fellows/Members may wish to submit their entire CEP associated with another College as evidence of their RACMA CEP. In this situation, the Fellow/Member should complete the CEP Certification for Conjoint Fellow Report (in Appendix 5.4 of the RACMA CEP Manual). 21. At the end of the triennial learning cycle, it is necessary for the Fellow/Member to complete the Contract Completion Certificate (Appendix 5.3) An actual administrator’s action is required to close the learning contract period, and this is currently proposed to occur on the basis of confirmation of appropriate approvals (eg National Director has approved certification), and will be undertaken at the National Secretariat only. When the triennial learning contract has been is certified as completed, the document is archived on the Fellow/Member’s individual RACMA webpage. The system will then generate another set of CEP documents, with relevant fields to be completed in order to start the next triennial cycle. The eCEP system will work in three-year cycles, as per the CEP Learning cycle. 22. The Certificate of Participation in the Continuing Education Program will only be produced if approval for certification is given, and so the certificate will not be automatically generated. 23. Each individual CEP Learning Plan (contract) can be lodged/prepared on the web/ on-line tool, whether in a learning group or using an individual plan. 24. The following procedures incorporate the CEP learning contract development of individual Fellows/Members involved in learning sets. This procedure was developed because the CEP Committee was advised that it would not be possible to set up the system so that all members of a learning set can sign off electronically, and given the value gained from learning sets, it is strategically important not to discourage Fellows/Members from forming them. This solves 80% of the online tool format problem, and provides the added advantage of providing some insight into what learning sets there are, and who is involved in them, which has been on the drawing board for a while without making much progress towards completion. It also means that the CEP Coordinator sign-off as part of an online CEP tool can remain standard, although the level of scrutiny required of the CEP Coordinator is less for those individual contracts reviewed by a learning set (as will be enshrined in the CEP business rules). i) Fellows/Members all develop and submit an individual contract about their CEP independent of whether it is via a learning set process or via the local CEP Coordinator, so there is no variation to this stage. ii) The variation occurs at endorsement/sign-off of the contract. For individuals not part of a learning set, the local CEP Coordinator provides sign-off. This is the process reflected in the current online CEP tool. iii) For those previously involved in a learning set, the practice in the paper format was for the individual to bring their individual draft contract to a leaning set meeting, and discuss it with their learning set colleagues to seek their endorsement as a set. If the learning set endorsed the individual's contract, then every member signed the paper contract and it then was considered agreed, and without needing first to go through the CEP Coordinator. iv) The new process for those involved in a learning set, in the interests of making it simple, is that the online tool be modified as follows: a) a tick box be created to be ticked in the event that the Fellow/Member has developed their individual contract as part of participation in a learning set. b) a free text box be created in which the Fellow/Member includes the names of the members of the Learning Set who have formally agreed to their individual contract. v) The local CEP Coordinator will then endorse the individual's CEP contract in the online tool without any change to the current online format. However, the context of this endorsement/sign-off will be that the contract has been developed through a "process" consistent with the required process in the context of a learning set (this context will be subsequently documented in the CEP business rules to cover the CEP coordinators).

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 20 May 2008 )