Continuous Medical Education (CME): Motivations and Barriers to Participation

Continuous Medical Education (CME) is necessary to keep health-care staff up to date in providing health services. All countries have been carefully planned for more effective continuous medical education that reduces medical costs and errors, therefore, the participants’ views and opinions are important. Due to this, the present study surveyed viewpoints of general physicians and specialists of Yazd in 2011 about facilitators and barriers of participation in CME programs. A cross-sectional study carried out, and sampling method was simple. Subsequently, data was collected by a self-structured questionnaire, and its validity and reliability were confirmed too. Overall, 181 general physicians and specialists, who participated in CME programs, completed the questionnaire. In addition, mean age of participants was 43.82 years; 57% of them were general physicians and 43% were specialists. The main motivators of participation in programs were the venue of the programs (71.2%) and being in accord with the latest knowledge (58%). The most prevalent barriers to participation were having enough CME scores (65.7%) and the inappropriate date of programs (40.8%). Hence, attention to motivations and barriers of participation in programs seems to be effective in planning for CME and it would be important in the management of presentation of programs.