Continuing Medical Education Case Study

Medical schools now recognize the need for training beyond lectures and in classrooms and are making the move to allowing students to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge by other means. Continuing medical education providers are doing the same and now offer a wide range of professional activities designed to allow health care professionals, including pharmacists, to obtain the credits they need using a variety of formats. With the help of these flexible pathways, health care professionals are finding they can routinely update their abilities while filling any gaps in their training. As a result, health care continues to improve, and the free CPE activities offered through Impact Education, LLC are a great place to start.

The Challenge

Facing Health Care

In the 1960s, medical schools emphasize courses in the basic sciences and memorization of facts. Often, students would be required to complete multiple choice questions following the second and fourth year of school to ensure they had mastered the material. Although the knowledge gained was of great importance and continues to be critical today, the problem is the information didn't and doesn't always transfer over to the real world. This leaves doctors unprepared in many ways to handle the needs of their patients when they do graduate from medical school. Continuing medical education courses, such as the free CPE activities, now realize this and are transforming the way this information is delivered for better outcomes.

The Future Of Medical Education

In addition to learning the necessary information about the human body and its systems, health care professionals must acquire other critical skills as part of their training.

For example, anyone in the health care field will need to work with others to provide the optimal level of care, thus an emphasis needs to be placed on team leadership. Health care costs continue to rise, thus continuing medical education courses need to emphasize being a good steward of resources and the focus needs to move from the health of an individual to improving the health of the population overall. Furthermore, as technology continues to increase in importance in the medical field, all health care professionals must have a better understanding of telehealth platforms and electronic health records, among other

things.

Chronic Conditions

One problem many health care professionals encounter is patients build a tolerance to certain medications over time, when dealing with a chronic condition. In addition, certain ailments demand multiple medications be taken, and this can be an issue. All parties working with the patient need to be aware of the medications being used and their interactions, among other things. Furthermore, an awareness of new therapies and medications is critical to dealing with issues of this type, as a new treatment may be exactly what the patient needs to witness a better quality of life. For this reason, pharmacists must have access to continuing medical education that will allow them to participate fully in a patient's health care team and contribute to their overall treatment plan.

Pharmaceutical Challenges

Pharmacists must deal with challenges not seen in previous generations.

The rise of counterfeit and fake drugs needs to concern all in the medical field and medication errors continue to be an issue. A simple error in the dosage of a medication can be fatal, yet problems such as this occur every day. In addition, drug abuse is an issue that must be addressed by those in the pharmaceutical industry, as a pharmacist may be the first to notice a person comes in regularly with prescriptions for pain medications from different doctors. These are only a few of the many issues that may be addressed in free CPE activities, and there are numerous others. For example, online pharmacies, especially those based in other countries, continue to entice many individuals looking to save on their health care costs. What does this mean for pharmacists and how will this problem be addressed? Everyone working in this field must be aware of these and other issues to ensure they are delivering the best care

possible.

Why Continuing Education?

Every health care professional needs to take part in continuing medical education, as it provides a time to reflect on life, both at the personal and professional level. Individuals, when doing so, find they can identify any area where they are lacking and plan a way to achieve the desired level of competence in these areas. The free CPE activities make it easy to do so, and the variety of formats ensures all can take part in a manner that is convenient to them.

The managed care setting provides a unique opportunity for pharmacists and pharmacy directors. All CPE contact hours or continuing education credits are designed to provide engaging and meaningful knowledge-based and application-based activities that will benefit those in need of these credits. Furthermore, they are provided free of charge and cover a wide range of timely, important topics. Choose from on-demand, live and journal-based activities, as all deliver the tools and resources needed to improve pharmacy practices. Look into the free CPE classes offered through Impact Education, LLC today, as one or more are sure to be of help.