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Is the research on continuing education of health professionals underutilized?

There is a perception that practitioners and policy makers (and perhaps even some of the researchers) in the field of continuing education for health professionals (CEHP) underutilize the research literature. This concern came to the fore recently during a session at this year’s Alliance for CME meeting in San Francisco. The goal of the session was to discuss strategies to encourage research utilization. The discussion reminded me of a book, Using Evidence: How Research Can Inform Public Services, by Sandra Nutley, Isabel Walter, and Huw Davies,1 all of whom are engaged in facilitating the transfer of research into practice in the United Kingdom and have given the issue of using research a great deal of thought. Revisiting this work, I was struck by the challenges involved in answering a seemingly simple empirical question: “Is the research on continuing education of health professionals underutilized?” There is much complexity embedded in that question. It is leads to a thicket of issues, some philosophical, some empirical, some political. Here is a sampling: