Competency Recommendations

3.1 Academic institutions, curriculum designers and planners, faculty members, and others should develop, test, and refine curricula that emphasize and reflect the value of lifelong learning and incorporate lifelong learning skills. Their accrediting bodies should incorporate measurable competencies and outcomes of lifelong learning into standards and program expectations.

Along with institutional and professional accrediting bodies assessing the extent to which entry-level health professional education programs provide learners with and test lifelong learning skills, undergraduate and entry-level educational programs should also undergo reform. This latter process would include promoting educational curricula that focus on individual and group responsibility for self-directed learning while building a foundational culture of responsibility for externally-guided continuous learning throughout the professional's working life. Such a process might include:

• Rebalancing health professional curricula towards an emphasis on knowledge management, self-assessment, and related skills

• Developing and testing tools to assess lifelong learning skills, self-assessment abilities, and knowledge management competencies;

• Targeting lifelong learning to changing health care needs and practices; for example, addressing an aging and diverse U.S. population through inter-professional team collaboration;

• Emphasizing information and communication technology usage to better prepare learners for learning throughout their careers. These technologies include those related to informatics, telehealth, computer-based instruction, virtual simulation, and others.

3.2 Continuing education planners, faculty and teachers, and regulatory bodies, (including accrediting, certifying and licensing bodies) should value, comprehend, and support the principles of lifelong learning in education activities and their regulatory processes, including credit systems, standards, and assessment processes.Achievement of this recommendation would require the incorporation of the following elements:

• Developing new 'business' models that support learning, aligned with new CE opportunities, approaches, and methodologies;

• Designing CE activities to incorporate a broad organizing framework that addresses learning needs related to not just clinical but cognitive, interpersonal, moral/ethical, and skill development needs at the individual and system level;

• Targeting learning using social networking principles and balancing the use of simulation and technology with human interaction and mentorship;

• Incorporating real-time technology, using emerging approaches which have the capacity to increase accessibility for users and can provide for evaluation;

• Improving self-assessment through the use of metrics related to health professional knowledge, skills, behaviors, and health care outcomes across the educational continuum;

• Developing mechanisms for external validation and feedback from colleagues in similar clinical practices

• Evaluating and documenting changes in care processes and patient outcomes attributable to lifelong learning activities. Such strategies require attention to analysis of different systems' levels (micro, macro, and meso) with appropriately aligned metrics and efforts to avoid over and under-measuring

• Providing credit for these individual LLL, evidence-based CE activities.

3.3 Healthcare settings and systems, employers and their accreditation systems should support and incorporate the value of lifelong learning and the skills necessary to make its adoption a reality for the professionals associated with their organizations.

This process would safeguard opportunities in health care organizations for health professionals' lifelong learning (52). Health care organizations would be encouraged to determine and support the continuing education needs of the health professional staff and other employees. In addition, such a process would support the development of strategies that address a variety of factors that determine success in this area, including organizational, sociopolitical, and individual factors. Finally, achievement of this recommendation would establish an infrastructure for the lifelong learning of all health care professionals within organizations that:

• Meets the various needs of health professionals;

• Integrates the logistics of continuing education participation (time, financing and other factors) into the workplace;

• Supports the implementation of technology use and other strategies that foster partnerships and learning among health professionals;

• Measures the impact of CE programs on learning, practice changes, and patient outcomes;

• Promotes workforce development, including attention to knowledge transfer which captures the wisdom of experts at the micro- and macro-system levels to avoid the clinical and organizational consequences of lost knowledge.