There was a request recently to categorise aspects of postgraduate medical education as either "academic" or "vocational." This raises a question about the meaning of words and about the logic behind such a distinction. In common parlance "academic" means impracticable and irrelevant to the real business of living. A "vocation" was once a calling to the higher rungs of a profession but now "voc...

BACKGROUND Continuing education (CE) is an essential professional activity. In the last decade, CE has been actively pursued by the medical profession in Australia and abroad. However, the uptake of CE in dentistry has been much slower and there is minimal Australian data on dental CE. METHODS To determine the level of CE activity, in 1998, postal questionnaires were sent to all fellows of th...

Public Health Education and Promotion, a new section of the journal Frontiers in Public Health, provides a refreshing forum for those readers who have traversed the familiar landscape of near-intractable health inequities on a national and global level and desire new knowledge on how best to ameliorate health inequities and the social factors that perpetuate them. The new “frontier” in public h...

to Rolf, for teaching me the art of doubting and the science of searching for the answers. To Tuuli, who left us early, but will always live in my heart.

In the past decade, there has been an enormous growth of distance education courses and programs in higher education. The growth of distance education is particularly evident in the field of health education. However, the enormous potential of distance education is tempered by one overriding question: How does one ensure that distance education coursework and degrees are of high quality? To thi...

Continuing medical education sessions are often poorly attended by general practitioners. One reason may be that these traditionally consist of lectures by hospital consultants with a strong theoretical bias which may have little relevance to the learning needs of general practitioners. To compare the learning styles of teachers and learners in general practice, learning style questionnaires we...

POSTGRADUATE education has been discussed to a great extent among doctors, association committees, health authorities and among university 'teachers. Owing to the relative shortage of teachers a 'co-ordination committee which has recently been appointed has just started work. The committee collects information about all postgraduate education planned or running for general practitioners and spe...

The relationship between industry and clinicians in educational programmes needs to be regulated. Industry may be best placed to deliver educational programmes in "craft" related specialties and particularly in areas where device implantation/technology based therapy has a major clinical role. The authors supervise industry sponsored clinical teaching at a purpose built independent teaching fac...

The 2009 Framework defines the joint Dutch national learning outcomes to be attained by medical students after completing their three-year master programme in medicine. The Framework thus helps to guarantee to society at large and to patients in particular that medical graduates who are starting out as practitioners have attained a certain professional level. This level is the aggregate of the ...