An outcomes approach to evaluate professional development programmes for medical educators.

1 Director of Education Programs, Harvard Medical International 2 Professor, Harvard Medical School Address for Correspondence: Dr Elizabeth G. Armstrong, Harvard Medical International, 1135 Tremont Street, Boston MA 02120, USA. Email: [email protected] Do our Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programmes provide significant measurable and desirable results? The key metric for evaluating programmes in the past has been the satisfaction of participating healthcare providers. Often the participants stated they enjoyed the course, time well spent from their perspective, and returned to their home institutions with little or no change visible in their behaviours. This problem was formally recognised in 2000 by the Continuing Medical Education Advisory Group1 of the Association of American Medical Colleges, who advocated that there be new methods to evaluate the efficacy of CME programmes and better sharing of