European Nuclear Medicine Guide
Effective and efficient health systems, with the capacity to provide safe and high quality healthcare deeply depend on having a well-trained efficient health workforce with the right skills and competences.
Continuing medical education (CME) and continuing professional development (CPD) are the mainstay for ensuring physicians’ competence and fitness to practice. As progress in medicine becomes ever faster, the necessity to up-date ones knowledge is even greater. It has been estimated that about half of all medical knowledge is out of date within five years.
CME is fundamental to good medical practice and for delivery of high-quality patient care. Based upon the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS) Charter on CME (1994, Chapter IV, art. 6), CME represents a moral and ethical commitment for each medical specialist to ensure that the clinical care they practice is safe and based on valid scientific evidence and can be defined as “educational activities serving to maintain, develop or increase knowledge, skills and professional performance and relationships used by physicians to provide services to patients, the public, and the profession.”
The term CPD better reflects where CME is heading and covers the continuum of life-long medical education, at all stages of a career. In its 2001 policy paper (the Basel Declaration on CPD) the UEMS defines CPD as “the educative means of updating, developing and enhancing how doctors apply their knowledge, skills and attitudes required in their working lives.” The goal of CPD is to improve all aspects of medical practitioners work performance.
The Chapter III of the European Directive on Professional Qualification released in November 2013 (EU Directive 2013/55/EU), clearly states that “EU Member States shall, in accordance with the procedures specific to each Member State, ensure by encouraging continuous professional development, that professionals are able to update their knowledge, skills and competencies in order to maintain a safe and effective practice and keep abreast of professional developments. CPD should cover technical, scientific, regulatory and ethical developments.”
The UEMS Section and European Board of Nuclear Medicine (UEMS/EBNM) established in 2000 the CME/CPD Accreditation Committee as the scientific and technical body of EBNM aimed to evaluate and accredit nuclear medicine CME/CPD activities in Europe; to provide high quality standards of scientific and educational content of CME/CPD activities in nuclear medicine; to ensure transparency and independence of CME/CPD programs from the influence of the healthcare industry and to assist national and international nuclear medicine societies in planning and implementing CME/CPD programs.
The EBNM CME Accreditation Committee is working under the umbrella of the UEMS/European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (EACCME); a Council established by UEMS in 1999 with the aim of harmonizing achievement and improving the quality of specialist medical care in Europe, and of promoting in both individuals and institutions the pursuit of the highest quality standards of CME and CPD.
The quality criteria and mechanisms for accreditation of both LEEs and e-learning materials have been extensively and clearly described in two documents approved by the EACCME namely “EACCME criteria for the accreditation of e-learning materials (ELM)” and “EACCME 2.0 criteria for the accreditation of live educational events (LEE).”
In this era of cross-border healthcare with a pan-European right to treatment for patients, competitive healthcare markets, cross-border mobility of medical specialists, increasing need to improve skills and competencies and to gain professional qualifications recognized throughout Europe and to ensure and harmonize CPD-lifelong learning programs is becoming more and more important. In this challenging scenario the UEMS/EBNM together with its accreditation committees and the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) with the European School of Multimodality Imaging & Therapy (ESMIT) are playing a leading role in defining post-graduate training and lifelong learning CPD requirements for maintenance of skills and competences in nuclear medicine (NM) as well as in accrediting NM departments and NM training centers in Europe.
References
Author
Teresio Varetto