Business as usual? A review of continuing professional education and adult learning

The commodification of education in all forms has created a lucrative trade, particularly within the realm of continuing professional education. Mandated across a wide spectrum of industries, and particularly salient in healthcare due to rapid advances in medicine and technology, professional education is said to be the vehicle that keeps practitioners informed of the latest developments in their respective fields. While outwardly noble in intent, the lack of application of sound adult educational paradigms and the stranglehold on quality and content criteria held by programme accrediting bodies has largely fostered an environment ripe with top-down passive material transmission. Proprietors of professional education have used its compulsory nature primarily as a means of increasing revenues and have missed the opportunity to overhaul a broken system characterised as valuing quantity over quality. A review of research in the healthcare continuing educational system in the United States as viewed through the lens of andragogical theory reveals a landscape absent of educational accountability, governed by stakeholder agencies more interested in enforcing the maintenance of a programme roster or transcript than creating legitimate learning experiences.