UF College of Medicine promotes practice-based medical education through conference and journal

Physicians could make fewer mistakes, answer more questions and provide better care using an innovative learning method, says a University of Florida education expert responsible for a recent conference and journal devoted to the topic.

Known as practice-based learning and improvement, the method encourages physicians to learn from their observations and use outside information sources in practice, said Floyd Pennington, Ph.D., associate director for continuing education at UF’s College of Medicine.

Last fall, Pennington organized a first-ever conference on practice-based learning, and papers written for the conference recently appeared in a special issue of The Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions. Topics addressed at the conference included defining issues crucial to the learning method and teaching physicians to use it.

“UF has taken the lead nationally and worldwide in this area,” Pennington said. “We hope to get practice-based learning and improvement integrated into residency training and the undergraduate medical student curriculum.”