Continuing Education Annual Report
Mission & Vision
Baystate Health Continuing Education meets the needs and is the content provider-of-choice of health care professionals in western Massachusetts.
Purpose
Baystate Health provides high-quality, evidence based continuing education to maintain and enhance the knowledge, competence, and/or performance of health care professionals, in order to improve the health of the people in our communities every day, with quality and compassion.
Content Areas
Our educational activities support learning in all of the clinical specialties and patient care services represented within Baystate Health. We provide educational activities that serve to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills and professional performance and relationships that health care professionals use to provide services for patients, the public or their profession. The content of our activities is designed to present the strongest available evidence for practice and to be free of commercial bias.
Aligned with our safety and quality improvement initiatives, we focus on:
- Anesthesiology and Pain Management
- Medicine and the Medical Subspecialties of cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, endocrinology, oncology, geriatrics, intensive care, nephrology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and pulmonary care
- Surgery
- Behavioral Health/Psychiatry
- Emergency Medicine
- Obstetrics & Gynecology
- Pathology
- Pediatrics
- Radiology
Our content is designed to be in harmony with the national health care agenda particularly the focus on prevention of disease and the efficient delivery of care. The educational activities we provide support learning and improvement and may contribute to maintenance of certification, license sure, and/or privileges.
The content is designed to support professionalism, excellence in patient care, system based practice, interpersonal skills, medical knowledge and leadership. We address health care related ethical, legal, political, and social issues.
With community coalitions and partnerships, we address the public health issues relevant to our community.
We develop innovative approaches for effective teaching and learning in order to facilitate the transfer of knowledge into daily clinical practice.
Target Audience
Our audience includes all members of the health care team and others who can facilitate access to care for our patients. We address the needs of clinicians across a wide spectrum of settings ranging from academic medical centers to urban and rural practices and clinics. We address the needs within our institution and the needs of local and regional health care providers.
Types of Activities
We provide multidisciplinary and specialty-specific activities using a variety of effective approaches to learning. The regularly scheduled conferences and regional seminars use formats designed to assist professionals to modify and improve their practice including: simulation; case conferences; lectures; small group discussions; and other innovative approaches to learning. The curriculum design and learning formats for each educational activity are chosen based on the professional practice gaps and leaner objectives the activity is designed to address.
Expected Results
We evaluate the impact of our activities on our learners’ competence, performance, and/or patient outcomes by quantitative and qualitative measures through a combination of data analysis tools including activity evaluations, faculty evaluations, audience response evaluations, return demonstrations, and research studies. Continuing Education and Baystate's adjunct non-educational strategies are expected to contribute towards the continuous improvement in the quality and safety of patient care. We expect that our learners will report either greater confidence in their current approach to care, intent to change their practice, identification of the barriers to change, or the need for additional education.
For simulation-based educational activities, we expect that our learners will demonstrate competence in the targeted skills upon completion of all training and educational activities.
We expect that our research and evaluation studies, examining the influence of educational interventions on clinician performance indicators and relevant patient outcomes, will show a positive effect of our educational and training efforts.
