Continuing Education Program Annual Report 2006

Dr Kim Hill The development of the College’s Continuing Education Program has successfully continued in the past year, facilitated by the now regular meetings of the State/Branch CEP Coordinators with the National Director Continuing Education/Recertification. In 2006-2006, the main focus has been on review of participation rates, implementation of CEP audits, enhanced networking between States/Branches in relation to local initiatives such as management for clinicians, and preparation for AMC review. On a national level, there have been three meetings between the Medical Colleges about their continuing education programs, led by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who sponsored the LEAP program last year. In order to move these discussions forward, it has been proposed to hold a face-to-face meeting of College CPD Chairs, to be auspiced by CPMC, to examine common issues such as standards, documentation and requirements of those Fellows with affiliations to more than one College. The RACMA CEP Coordinators consider that this collaboration between the Colleges is of potential strategic significance and maintain a watching brief through their regular agenda. Within RACMA, participation rates have been monitored during the past year, to ensure that the favourable trends of last year are continuing. Due to staffing changes, the National Secretariat has not been able to produce end of year reports on current participation rates. However, the last reported participation rates (as of April 2006) showed a CEP participation rate of 64% for Fellows and 47% for Members. Whilst the improvement in these participation rates is pleasing, the objective of the CEP State Coordinators is to see this continue to rise in the next 12 months towards the 100% mark for Fellows. Also within RACMA, a process of random audits has now been introduced, and preliminary reports from the National Secretariat indicated that those responses received were of good quality. However, some Fellows have not responded to the audit, and the Secretariat was following these up. However, at the time of writing this report, progress information about the audit was not available. Key developments for CEP in 2006-2007 include the implementation of relevant parts of the RACMA Strategic Plan and preparation for AMC accreditation. This is likely to place additional demands on those involved in the College’s education activities. On the positive side, there are also clear opportunities to enter into partnership with other Colleges to provide clinician manager professional development for their members, as well as members of RACMA. In raising this opportunity, it has been suggested that gains would be greater if there was infrastructure support provided to CEP Coordinators in their roles at State and National level. This requirement will become clearer once the implications of preparing for AMC accreditation can be factored in, and hopefully this will occur in the next few months. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the State/Branch CEP Coordinators for their substantial contributions during the past year. The College is very much dependent on the voluntary time of its CEP Coordinators and I am very grateful for their advice and assistance in moving our CEP initiatives forward during the past year. I look forward to another productive phase of development of CEP in 2006-2007. Dr Kim Hill 2006 Annual Report of the National Director Continuing Education/Recertification

Last Updated ( Thursday, 28 May 2009 )