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The Josiah Macy Foundation’s 2007 conference on continuing education (CE) in the health professions identified the need, and set the stage for, improvement in this last and longest phase of health professionals’ education. Establishing a platform for change in an era of health care reform, the report stressed incorporatingfindings from the extensive literature of health professions’ CE. These included: decreasing the focus on the didactic lecture as the primary format for CE; increasing awareness of practice-based learning; heightening attentiveness to the importance of CE as a tool to improve competency and performance in the academic health center; developing interprofessional education; and instilling lifelong learning skills.
The 2007 report, however, was silent on the ways by which these findings could be implemented. The need to move to this next step prompted the Macy Foundation to fund a jointly sponsored conference and consensus process hosted by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). This was a three-phase effort, detailed in Section 1; a pre-conference planning phase in which white papers were created in several critical areas and an invitation extended to key thought leaders and organizational representatives in Medicine and Nursing, subsequently known as the Expert Panel; an invitational conference involving these individuals; and a post-conference period devoted to expanding and consolidating the white papers and developing clear recommendations in five key areas. Although the conference focused primarily on nursing and medicine, feedback from a broader interprofessional stakeholder group was sought as the recommendations and report were finalized. Feedback from this interprofessional group was positive and indicated that the content and recommendations presented in this report were relevant to all health professional lifelong learning and continuing education.
The recommendations and dialogue articulated here represent the consensus of the Expert Panel, comprised of content experts and representatives of a wide array of stakeholders, including education, practice, and regulation. The report describes a preferred future for health professionals’ continuing education or professional development and lifelong learning, which can best be attained through full implementation of the recommendations distilled here.

Copyright © 2010 by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the Association of American Medical Colleges. All rights reserved.