Changes and Challenges of Continuing Medical Education in the Covid-19: A Narrative Review

Continuing medical education is a continuing process to teach clinicians and provide patients with up-to-date, evidence-based care. The current study is a review type that through searching in databases; Google Scholar, PubMed, Elsevier and ProQuest Scopus, has been done in the range of 2019-2022. Articles were searched based on the keywords of continuing medical education, virtual education, electronic education and corona-virus and the English equivalent of Continuing Medical Education, Virtual Teaching, E-Learning, Corona-Virus. In the initial review, a number of 476 articles and documents were searched, after removing 86 duplicates, and then they were reviewed in terms of the inclusion criteria, and the articles that met the inclusion criteria after a complete review, finally, 28 articles that met the inclusion criteria were included in the study for final analysis. The results indicate the effective methods in education in medical sciences and electronic learning are mentioned as a common and effective method. The findings showed that the use of electronic learning, mobile learning, online training, simulator learning environment and blended learning can be effective in improving the skills and adequacy of continuous training. The use of electronic education has led to an increase in the motivation of participants due to saving time for studying and learning educational materials. The results of the challenges and opportunities observed from the texts examined in this research show that, considering the challenges and opportunities of virtual education for providers and learners, the necessity of assessing the needs of practitioners and experts regarding the required training and evolution in virtual education planning, the awareness and familiarity of virtual education planners and managers with these challenges and opportunities as a basic introduction to respond to existing problems and establish an efficient educational system. The development of virtual education requires the strengthening of the supporting role and support of the continuous medical education office of the university in providing infrastructure and financial resources and more independence to universities in planning and implementing the development of virtual education.