Regardless of the career path you’ve chosen for yourself, professional development is an essential part of staying on top of your game. If you’re in health care, it becomes even more important to develop and maintain your base of knowledge and skills throughout your career. Healthcare professionals are the bridge between patients, science-based knowledge, and the policies and practices used to deliver high quality care.
The Goals of Professional Development
Committing to continuing education and professional development is likely to lead to some very important goals including the discovery and application of health care practices to prevent illness and disease, enhance well-being and increase the quality of life and years of the public. Healthcare professionals are trusted by the public to provide care that is not only safe, but highly effective and efficient, timely, person-centered and equitable.
What’s the Difference Between Training, Education and Professional Development?
Training, education and professional development are used interchangeably and are sometimes mistaken for one or the other. Training refers to the beginning of understanding a process or function and standardizing it to yield similar and consistent results. A common example of it in senior care would be properly making a resident’s bed.
Education goes beyond the basics of training and involves processes by which healthcare professionals learn to apply solutions to problems and adapt to new situations as they arise. A care pathway is a good example in which an illness has multiple paths of treatment or best practices in care that lead to positive health outcomes for the resident.
Professional development, on the other hand, completely transcends both training and education and includes areas such as self-directed learning, quality improvement and systems changes. It teaches professionals how to apply solutions, identify problems and focus on one’s actual performance. An example is learning new supervisory skills, theory and methods to manage a special care wing or unit in a care facility.
A Newer Concept: Continuing Professional Development
Over the past few years, a new concept in learning has emerged called continuing professional development. It differentiates from training, education and even professional development in several ways. Continuing education and professional development are only parts of it, as there are others including tailored and learner-driven education that are built on broader theories than the other modalities of learning.
Continuing professional development incorporates self-learning as well as organizational and systems learning. It focuses on clinical aspects of healthcare and other practice-related content. It can be said to be a far more diverse form of learning and uses a variety of methods, styles, formats and environments. It can also be considered a system for maintaining, broadening and improving knowledge and skills through one’s professional life. Continuing professional development strives to develop effective practice and promote effective change now. An example is learning new and complex technology for specific health conditions.
Another Important Concept in Professional Development: Life-Long Learning
Nursing, in particular, is one profession where life-long learning is associated with a number of positive outcomes for the nurse, his or her patients, the organization and the nursing profession as a whole. Life-long learning occurs along a continuum from nursing school to graduate education and beyond. It lasts throughout the nurse’s entire career.
Life-long learning infuses education with experience which in turn creates a deeper wisdom in one’s career. It helps the individual to think more critically, identify and solve problems and enhance clinical reasoning. New techniques, technologies, policies and practices are acquired through this type of learning.
There are a number of ways healthcare professionals can engage in life-long learning including:
- Participating in distance learning and webinars
- Attending seminars, conferences and workshops
- Working towards specialty certification
- Joining professional associations
- Collaborating with other healthcare professionals
- Engaging in self-learning through reading scholarly articles
- Volunteering on committees
- Receiving on-the-job training
Conflicting Ideas about Professional Development
What is the purpose of training and education in healthcare? Most would agree that it is to update and reinforce knowledge and skills in healthcare professionals which ultimately should result in better care. Some may argue that continuing education is a means to attain credits in order to maintain one’s license and credentialing which are needed to continue practicing in one’s occupation (nursing, social work, nursing home administration).
Final Thoughts on the Importance of Professional Development
Training, education, professional development, and continuing professional development are all important methods of teaching healthcare professionals what they need to know at certain stations in their careers. Regulations by profession and state tend to differ in terms of content and the number of hours of education obtained annually. Regardless, it is important to remember all of the positive outcomes that are associated with professional development, namely improved quality of care for those who need it most.