Continuing professional development: progress beyond continuing medical education

Abstract: Continuing medical education (CME) is rapidly evolving into competency-based continuing professional development (CPD) and this is driving change in self-directed CPD programs undertaken by individual practitioners as well as CPD programs or frameworks offered by CPD educators. This progression is being led by many factors including the rapid change in medical knowledge and medical practitioners along with changes in patients and society, healthcare systems, regulators and the political environment. We describe our experiences primarily concerning low-resource environments, in creating the International Council of Ophthalmology (ICO) Guide to Effective CPD/CME and in developing a CPD program for the Cambodian Ophthalmological Society (COS) twinned with the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO). At the conclusion of the project, 47 (100%) Cambodian practicing ophthalmologists were registered in the CPD program and 21 (45%) were actively participating in the online COS-CPD program recording. We discuss challenges in CPD, propose solutions to overcome them and recommend developing research in CPD as needed to effectively enhance educational activities with impact in public health.