INTRODUCTION Low and middle-income countries suffer an ongoing deficit of trained public health workers, yet optimizing postgraduate education to best address these training needs remains a challenge. Much international public health education literature has focused on global capacity building and/or the description of innovative programmes, but less on quality and appropriateness. CASE DESCR...

PURPOSE To describe community leaders' perceptions regarding the impact of a fully distributed undergraduate medical education program on a small, medically underserved host community. METHOD The authors conducted semistructured interviews in 2007 with 23 community leaders representing, collectively, the education, health, economic, media, and political sectors. They reinterviewed six partici...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this research study was to determine whether a 1-hour online continuing medical education (CME) course focused on nutrition for type 2 diabetes would result in a gain in nutrition knowledge by practicing physicians. METHODS A practicing physician and dietitian collaborated to develop an online CME course (both webinar and self-study versions) on type 2 diabetes. This ...

In the United States of America, the Area Health Education Center (AHEC) system of training residents has allowed high-quality postgraduate education to flourish. This paper describes the evolution of the AHECs in the context of medical education over the past 50 years. The arrangements for programme administration and design, resident assessment and appraisal, training of trainers in education...

Medical education is at a crossroads. Although unique features exist at the undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education levels, shared aspects of all three levels are especially revealing, and form the basis for informed decision-making about the future of medical education.This paper describes some of the internal and external challenges confronting undergraduate medical education. Key i...

Prompted by evidence that the recently-adopted arrangements for ongoing eduction among established general practitioners are unsatisfactory, the first of a pair of papers examined the theoretical basis of continuing education for general practice and proposed a model of selfdirected learning in which the experience of established practitioners is connected, through the media of reading, reflect...

Public health competencies, especially as they relate to the management of chronic disease, will be of increasing importance to the global health-care workforce. The General Medical Council's recommendations on basic medical education have helped to entrench the position of public health and related disciplines. Tomorrow's Doctors has recently been updated. This article describes the indicative...

The field of professional medical continuing education is changing rapidly. The traditional format for continuing education for health care professionals has long been classroom learning. This form of learning has been found to be relatively ineffective in changing learners' practice patterns. The reasons most often cited are that there is little interaction and that the learning does not occur...

Recent evidence has provided a clear mandate for change in the way that registered nurses are educated-in both academic and continuing nursing education environments. This article explores strategies for changing the usual and customary approaches to better meet the needs of learners and prepare them to function effectively in a complex and challenging health care environment.

Public health technical expertise is of crucial importance to inform decision makers' action in the field of health and its broader determinants. Improving education and training of public health professionals for both practice and research is the starting point to strengthen the role of public health so that current health challenges can be efficiently tackled. At the Association of Schools of...