Chapter 1 - Improving Patient Care through Continuing Professional Development

Summary

Medicine is a rapidly developing field. Much of what many of us learned in medical school is now obsolete, and an expanding knowledge base has led to increasingly specialized services. If you add to this the fact that many doctors – by choice or as the result of service changes – change their areas of clinical practice, the need to continue learning and developing after completion of formal training is undeniable.

We learn on a day-to-day basis in our clinical practice. As well as taking the relatively obvious forms of reading a literature review or asking the advice of a colleague, learning will also be through continuous feedback, for example from patients about a particular approach we take or a good clinical outcome. Being open to everyday feedback and thoughtfully working in teams is therefore an important part of remaining a safe and effective practitioner.