Faculty Spotlight: Steve Caiola, MS — Improving Continuing Education
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Faculty Spotlight: Steve Caiola, MS — Improving Continuing Education
Improving Continuing Education
In North Carolina, pharmacists need to participate in ten hours of continuing education each year to renew their license. Half of that total must be done through contact programs that allow for live, two-way communication between the presenter and the attendee, such as seminars. The other five hours can be done through home study.
Starting in 2008, the North Carolina Board of Pharmacy will raise the required number of hours annually to fifteen, including eight live hours. The increase brings North Carolina in line with most other states, but Caiola, who oversees the School’s Postgraduate/Continuing Education Program, and some of his colleagues are working on an even more drastic change.
“I do believe that you need the live hours and that you need the live interaction with the expert,” Caiola says. “But I also believe that there are a lot more educational things than standard, traditionally recognized programming. Going to a seminar may mean that I sat, I heard, I forgot.”
Caiola is part of an NCAP taskforce looking at implementing a continuous professional development model. In CPD, pharmacists continually assess the skills they need to excel in their practice and to steer their careers in the direction they want. They then document these needs, develop a plan to address them, and carry out the plan. As a result, the training that pharmacists receive through continuing education would be more relevant to their needs.
The CPD model already has been adopted in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ontario and Alberta, Canada. Five states’ pharmacist associations, including North Carolina’s, are conducting a project to test the model’s effectiveness. In the North Carolina study, ninety-five pharmacists did two hours of home study about the CPD process through a CD-Rom in summer 2006. Forty-four of them decided to enroll in a nineteen-hour certificate program to actually apply the CPD process for the whole year. At the end of the program, they will be surveyed about the effectiveness of the experience, and the responses will be compared with their answers on the same questionnaire from the previous year, as well as responses from a control group.
“I was really interested in CPD because I really wanted more information from pharmacists that told me what they need in order to be better practitioners,” Caiola says. “The documentation of their self-assessment gives me feedback on what the pharmacists say they need, and it will help us build much better educational programming. Right now, getting that information is worse than pulling teeth.”
Caiola isn’t the only one interested in CPD. The N.C. Board of Pharmacy is considering the model as a potential alternative to the traditional system in the future. It is even allowing the pharmacists who took part in the CPD project to substitute their CPD experience in place of a listing of continuing education hours in their 2008 license renewal application. These pharmacists still have to fulfill the live-hour requirement, and some will be audited for documentation of their participation in CPD.
There will also be other tweaks to the requirements in 2008. One of the changes will allow pharmacists to earn home-study hours by reading any material they want, as long as it is pertinent to their practice. They must document what they read, what they got out of the material, how they will use that information, and afterwards, how it has influenced their practice. The board will also credit pharmacists for documented cases of what Caiola calls unplanned learning—situations where pharmacists have to do some substantive research on topics that spontaneously arise during their practice day.
“When I look up the information, call an expert or a colleague, look in a journal, do a review on the Web, get the answer, and get back to the patient and say, ‘This is what I found out, and this is how it influences your care,’ I’ll remember that information,” Caiola says. “That’s the best education, because you use it, and it influences the patient’s care.
“We’re quantifying these kinds of things. We will audit some of the pharmacists that report that they followed a CPD process to see if they are really doing enough to at least maintain if not improve their competence. But the odds are, if they follow the process, select their eight live hours to meet their self-defined needs and document a few of their unplanned learnings, even if they accomplish just some of their remaining learning plan, they are going to be better practitioners than if they just attend a program that has little relevance to their practice needs, that they went to just to get the hours and keep their license.”