As the clinical work environment changes and evolves, the needs of continuing professional development (CPD) evolve alongside. With changes in our clinical work environment (increasing technology, time constraints, increasing acuity/volume), and the ever-expanding amount of medical literature, these factors make it difficult to keep up with recent advances in the health sciences.
On top of the changing clinical environment, disruptive innovations are also altering how and what people learn [1]. The advent of social media (including the Free Open Access Medical (FOAM) education movement [2, 3]) has led to a drastic change in the way people access information via continuous access evidence updates (e.g. on blogs and in podcasts), threatening the traditional lecture-based conferencing models of continuing education in the health professions [1, 4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Academically, new and existing faculty members are constantly being asked to do more with less. New faculty members (especially community faculty) can often find it difficult to establish their identity as teachers, scholars, and academics without proper support [11, 12], especially when they must learn new approaches such as competency-based medical education [13, 14].
Locally, CPD for emergency medicine in Hamilton has traditionally focused on regional rounds (lecture-based with a guest speaker) as well as a small annual conference (10:EM, a 10-minute emergency medicine conference). Noticing a declining attendance at both the rounds and the conference, we harnessed the power of design thinking [15, 16] and set forth to identify the CPD needs of emergency physicians in the area.