Vision & Mission

Vision
The vision of the Office of Continuing & Community Education is to become the state of Connecticut’s leading resource with regard to continuing education of physicians and other health care professionals.

Mission
The mission of the Office of Continuing & Community Education is to support the University of Connecticut School of Medicine’s mission of educating practitioners, teachers, and researchers to provide exemplary patient care, research, and public service. The Office supports that mission in the following ways:

• To assess the needs that Health Center physicians and other clinicians have for ongoing education and to make those needs known to educators developing programs and activities;
• To provide evidence-based guidance on constructing activities that maximize the utility of education to increase awareness, change behavior and improve outcomes;
• To ensure that educational activities include options that accommodate a variety of different learning styles, preferences, and formats;
• To review applications for continuing medical education to ensure that such programs are consistent with the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education’s standards for issuing CME;
• To advocate for the rigorous evaluation and assessment of educational programs and ensure that evaluation results inform ongoing programs and activities; and,
• To support and conduct research on the education of health professionals and to share such research findings with the professional community through publications, presentations, and collaboration.
• To develop and evaluate a CME strategic plan each year in priority areas of patient care for which opportunities for improvement exist or in which monitoring is important to maintain progress made.  The Office of Continuing & Community education should use the CME strategic plan to encourage education activities in the priority areas.

As part of the Office of Continuing & Community Education’s mission, the Office embraces the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education’s definition of CME:

“Continuing medical education consists of educational activities which serve to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance and relationships that a physician uses to provide services for patients, the public, or the profession. The content of CME is that body of knowledge and skills generally recognized and accepted by the profession as within the basic medical sciences, the discipline of clinical medicine, and the provision of health care to the public” (2005).