Five ways to engage learners with CPD

How do you engage healthcare and allied healthcare professionals with their CPD, and keep them engaged? How do you maintain relevance without losing the interest of the learner? What level of detail should be included? How do you develop CPD for both online and face-to-face learners?

 Every CPD developer and educator contends with these questions on a daily basis. Listed below are five areas that are critical to the development of quality CPD.

 1.     The educational activity must support the need. Did you undertake a needs analysis or do some research into the activity you are designing? Healthcare practitioners seek CPD that is going to help them by genuinely meeting their needs. There is no point in trying to convince healthcare professionals to undertake CPD that won’t help them. Find out what your clients need and ask them how they want it to be delivered.

 2.     The educational activity must be useful. Evaluate! You need to evaluate (post-activity) as to whether the CPD activity was useful, informative (provided new knowledge) and contributed to a change in the health care professional’s practice. The evaluation process can be as simple as posing 5-6 questions using rating scales and inviting suggestions for improvement. Find out what elements worked best and what they didn’t enjoy.

 3.     Approach an activity with a clean slate. Many CPD developers can be tempted to re-purpose, renew or contextualise existing content. While this can shorten production time and create efficiencies, it rarely works. There will be parts you can re-use around particular theories or opinions of key leaders. However, start with a clean slate and write to your audience. They’ll know if you haven’t and will quickly lose interest. You may ask an opinion leader or lead practitioner to review your content and ask for suggestions. It might cost you a few dollars for their time, but it will be worth it down the track when you find out that your clients valued the CPD because it was personalised and contextualised to their industry.   

 4.     Relevance, currency, balance and independence. If an activity is sponsored by a third party company, you need to avoid creating the impression of bias. How do you do that without upsetting the sponsor?  Your CPD activity should be relevant, current, and balanced; and it should be independent of third party influence and accept best practice treatment or diagnostics. It shouldn’t favour one product over another or draw unnecessary comparisons with another product. However, keep in mind that third party companies usually have the most up-to-date information about their products or services. It is about balance.

 5.     Technology and innovation.  Your CPD activity needs to be accessible to the widest possible audience. That means you may have to use a range of technologies and innovations that can assist you to deliver effective CPD. We have on-line learning (through LMS), webinars (synchronous and asynchronous), and web-based technologies through to face-to-face, distance and blended versions. There are also audits, case study discussions, clinical observations, forums and blogs. It is worth investigating to determine which technologies are best suited to you and your clients. 

 I welcome your thoughts and am happy to share them on this blog.