Time travel: a discovery tool for identifying individual professional development needs

After formal qualification, most practicing doctors try to update themselves to keep abreast with new knowledge and practice through periodic Continuing Medical Education (CME) programs. However, as opposed to CME which is teacher driven and only updates clinical knowledge, there is need for promoting Continuous Professional Development (CPD) which is individual learner driven based on individual learning needs and embraces developing and improving a broad range of skills and competencies necessary for improved medical practice. There is evidence from literature which shows that doctors become more motivated to learn and achieve required CPD goals when they discover their own CPD learning needs, plan their own CPD activities, do deliberate practice and receive feedback for improvement in practice at their own pace. This increased motivation is explained by the Need reduction theory. The Need reduction theory can be put to practice by doing a needs assessment (discrepancy analysis) which identifies the gap between “what is” and “what ought to be” (Fox & Miner,1999).