Audience-Specific Needs Assessment: Using a Gap Analysis Survey of CME Conference Registrants to Assess Presentation Content

摘要

As one of the nation's largest pediatric health care systems, Nemours Children's Clinic and Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children provide specialty and subspecialty care to children through campuses in Delaware, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. The organization is also dedicated to improving children's health care through research and education. Pediatrics for the Primary Care Physician is a Nemours-sponsored annual CME conference that has been offered in Amelia Island, Florida, for 14 consecutive years. It consists of three half-day sessions of lectures and workshops discussing general contemporary issues and subspecialty and surgical pediatrics. Last year (2007), the conference attracted 126 physicians and 37 allied health personnel.The curriculum for this conference historically has been developed using evaluations from the previous year, recently published literature, and the clinical practice experience of course directors and faculty speakers. While these obviously are important sources, we sought to refine our needs assessment in a way that would more accurately measure gaps in knowledge specific to our conference participants. Inspired by the recent work of Scolapio and coworkers (Advances and controversies in clinical nutrition: The education outcome of a live continuing medical education course.