Continuing Medical Education Strategy for Primary Health Care Physicians in Oman: Lessons to be learnt.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Continuing medical education (CME) is important for professional development, to improve doctors' clinical performance that ultimately influences the quality of the health outcomes. In the presence of an increasing number of family physicians serve in the primary health care system upon graduation in Oman make us to consider the meta-cognition of the leaner and engaged them in learning process. The purpose of this paper is to examine ways of improving the continuing education methods for the physicians. OBJECTIVE: To assess the preferred method of continuing education for primary health care physicians. METHODS: We conducted a program evaluation among a group of general physicians who were involved in some of the activities in continuing education at end of their program in the Muscat region health centres in Oman. The main outcome measure was to study the preferred method for CME. RESULTS: The majority of the participants believe that continuing medical education improves their practice. In addition, the finding suggests that small group learning and combination of methods are the preferred methods of continuing education for primary health care physicians. CONCLUSION: Interactive small group learning is shown to be more effective to achieve the learning objectives and ultimately improve practice. Practice-based small group learning is the method we recommended.