Addressing the need and opportunities for continuing education among healthcare professionals

The need for continuing education in healthcare

The shift to value based care starts with valuing and investing in healthcare’s greatest cost and also its greatest resource; its people, by ensuring continuous learning and development opportunities fit for the modern era and Healthcare 4.0. After all, while digitisation may get the majority of air-time in healthcare, it is remains the industry’s people who are on the frontline and need to keep their skills sharp.

The World Health Organization is unequivocal, “In order to provide the best patient care health professionals should invest in educational opportunities that give them up to date knowledge and skills.” Healthcare is first and foremost a people business and, while technology is streamlining and optimising the ecosystem, the provision of quality care depends inevitably on the ability of the healthcare organization to ensure that it has the right professionals with the right skills in the right place at the right time.

And it seems the workforce powering our healthcare systems are keen for the opportunity. According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital trends, learning and development ranked as the key factor for healthcare change, with workforce respondents rating “the opportunity to learn” among their top reasons for taking – and continuing in - a job. Offering healthcare professionals high-quality continuous education makes it possible to leverage excellence in healthcare performance.

This senior leader briefing champions the importance of prioritising training, including the development of continuous medical education programs and avoiding the inevitable urge to decommission it despite the cost savings, arguing that without continued investment in healthcare professionals’ education, the vision of high quality, guideline-driven, evidence-based health care will never happen.