The Dynamic nature of health care necessitates the medical staff remain competent and up to date through Continuing Professional Development (CPD).CPD is a term commonly used to denote the process of the ongoing education and development of health care professionals from initial qualifying education and for the duration of professional life in order to maintain competence to practice and increase professional proficiency and expertise [1].

CPD is a continual, life long process of personal and professional development. It is widely seen as a necessary progression in the rapidly changing healthcare sector. Grounded on the well‑developed tradition of lifelong learning in medical profession, CPD integrates ethical responsibility and increases job satisfaction[2].

In the past, the term Continuous Medical Education (CME) was the traditional way of continuous learning.  CME’s concept generally refers to expanding medical knowledge, skills, and attitudes [3].

CPD incorporates and exceeds this concept by acknowledging a wide range of competencies needed to practice high quality medicine, including medical, managerial, ethical, social, and personal skills [4].

The Aim of this study is to document the current situation regarding continuous professional development opportunities among healthcare and administration workers serving in large Primary Health Care polyclinics,to find out the barriers and to measure the satisfaction of the employees. 

200 employees were surveyed, 154 returned the questionnaires. The response rate was 77%.Of the respondents, 56.5% were females and about 46% were aged 30-39 years.

56% of the employee were physician an nurses (55.8%), 12 employees were doing administrative jobs (7.8%) and 10 employees were pharmacists ( 6.6%) table1.

Table 1: Jop description for the polyclinic staff (occupation)

Regarding the work experience,35% of the employees worked for less than five years,16% for at least 11 years and up to 15 years, only 9% worked for twenty years and more( table 2).

Table 2. Employees work experience in the polyclinics

It is obvious that more than half of the employees were attending their departmental educational activities and workshops,55.8% & 52.8% respectively while less employees are attending the academic courses and skill courses, 27% and 22.6 respectively (table3).

Table 3. Available CPD activities for the employees.

64.3% agreed that attending the workshops is the best way to achieve a professional development, 36.4% agreed about the skill courses like computer and language courses while 35.7% agreed about internet based learning (table 4).

Table 4.CPD activities preferred by the employees

67% of the employees considered the lack of the time allocated for the professional development activities the main barrier to achieve such activities. Other barriers includes lack of the interest of the employees and the polyclinics supervisors respectively, 19.5% and 13.6%, table 5.

Table 5. Barriers Affecting the CPD activities

No specific time was allocated officially for the CPD activities and the time allocated for CPD was differentiated, 43% of the employees spent 1-2 hours every month in the CPD activities and only 17% of the employees spent more than 6 hours every month attending such activities (table 6).

Table 6. Time allocated for the CPD

More than half of the employees, 54% were satisfied from the CPD activities of the polyclinics, 23.4% were neutral and 23.6% were unsatisfied (table 7).

Table 7. Employees’ satisfaction form CPD activities

Cross Sectional Descriptive study was carried out. All employee working in King Abdulaziz Housing City  (KAAHC) polyclinics “ two hundred employee “ received questionnaires either directly or through their supervisors.

The study data was collected by questionnaire prepared based on the study objectives. The questionnaire incudes fifteen question under four major parts, the first four questions were about the demographic data of the employee including the name “optional”, age, sex and nationality.

The second part includes four questions regarding the employment history, certificates and the years of services in the polyclinic.

The third part of the questionnaire was about the type of professional development programs in the institute and the last part, four questions, was about the barriers affecting the professional development and the level of the employees’ satisfaction.

The Questionnaire was validated by discussion with the clinics’ supervisors and after revision with an expert in medical researchs.

Data analysis was carried out using SPSS for Windows (Version 21). Means, range and/or standard deviation (SD) were used to describe continuous normally distributed data. Cross-tabulated data was analyzed with Pearson’s chi-square test. The limit for significance was set equal to 0.05

The inability of many employees, specially the workers in administrative jobs to recognize the term “ Continuous Professional Development” was the  main limitation of this study, other limitation was the questionnaires distribution and collection was by the department supervisors, this may make the participants gave biased answers.

In conclusion, continuing professional development is an important development program based on adult learning   process that need to be implemented in every health care institute. The Health care institutes’ authorities should encourage their staff to be up to date regarding their knowledge and skills. The few barriers in the study should not restrain the process of CPD.

[1]. Alsop, A. Continuing Professional Development: Chapter 1. In Continuing Professional Development: a Guide for Therapists. 2000; London: Blackwell Science Ltd.

[2]. Hojat M, Kowitt B, Doria C, Gonnella JS. Career satisfaction and professional accomplishments. Med Educ 2010;44:969‑76.

[3]. What is CME? UEMS page. Available from: http://www.uems. net/index.php?id=63. [Last accessed 2013 Nov 02].

[4]. Chan KW. Contrasting CME and CPD. Medical education: From continuing medical education to continuing professional development. Asia Pac Fam Med; 2002:88‑90.

[5]. Muula et al . Access to continued professional education among health workers in Blantyre, Malawi.African Health Scinces. 2004; 4(3) 182- 184