Abstract
Objectives: COVID-19 has forced a transformation in continuing professional development (CPD), shifting to virtual platforms. We report the results of a rapidly-implemented COVID-19 online interdisciplinary CPD webinar series. We aimed to determine if this virtual approach for large-scale CPD was relevant, appreciated, and effective for specialist physicians in Quebec.Methods and Analysis: This was a retrospective descriptive online survey-based study. The weekly virtual educational webinars took place between March 3, 2020 to June 15, 2020, resulting in a total of 26 webinars over 16 weeks. The study included all individuals who attended any of the webinar sessions, namely specialist physicians and department chiefs. Number of participants and overall appreciation of webinar sessions were data points collected.Results: Across all webinars, there were 8,500 unique specialist physicians which comprises 80.7% of the entire specialist practicing population in Quebec. Of note, every medical and surgical specialty was represented by attendance in at least one session. In total, 27,504 evaluation forms were completed out of all the sessions, meaning a 78.4% response rate. In post-webinar surveys, 97.6% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the webinars were pertinent to their practice and 94.6% agreed or strongly agreed that the presentation met their continuing professional needs.Conclusions: This novel interdisciplinary COVID-19 webinar series is a successful and appreciated strategy to maintain CPD amidst a global pandemic. One year later, it has become a mainstay in our toolbox and we trust this unique model of large-scale interdisciplinary CPD via webinar sessions is useful in normal times as well as in times of crisis.
Highlights
The novel COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent mitigation measures have significantly disrupted medical education and professional training at multiple levels, ranging from medical student curriculum to continuing professional development (CPD) [1, 2]
We report the results of a rapidly-implemented COVID-19 online interdisciplinary webinar series as a way of continuing professional development during a time of global crisis and addressing emerging educational needs
We describe the techniques used to organize, implement, and analyze the webinar series along with physician opinions on the sessions and the self-reported impact on their practice during the COVID-19 era
Summary
The novel COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent mitigation measures have significantly disrupted medical education and professional training at multiple levels, ranging from medical student curriculum to continuing professional development (CPD) [1, 2]. Interdisciplinary CPD activities have been shown to be crucial in building networking, knowledge exchange and collaboration between specialists in multidisciplinary patient care and have resulted in better quality patient care and health outcomes [4, 5]. CPD was achieved primarily via in-person workshops and conferences which came to an abrupt halt due to social distancing measures, forcing many changes in the medical education sphere in order to maintain the same quality and quantity of training for medical professionals. Simulation activities in particular were shown to be extremely useful in ensuring safe medical training in response to the COVID-19 pandemic [8, 9]
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