Evidence for Continuing Professional Development and Recency of Practice Standards for Regulated Health Professionals in Australia: Protocol for a Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Continuing professional development (CPD) and recency of practice (ROP) standards are components of health practitioner regulation in Australia. The CPD and ROP standards are currently under review, and an evidence base to assist the development of consistent standards is required. Preliminary searching was unable to find a recent systematic review of the literature to provide an evidence base to underpin the standards review. OBJECTIVE: This paper presents the protocol for a systematic review that aims to develop a current evidence base that will support the National Boards to develop more consistent, evidence-based, effective standards that are clear and easy to understand and operationalize. METHODS: Research questions were developed to support the planned review of CPD and ROP registration standards. Major databases and relevant journals were searched for articles published in English between 2015 and 2021, using key search terms based on previous unpublished reviews of the CPD and ROP registration standards. The quality of the articles retrieved will be assessed using an instrument suitable for use in the development of public policy. The findings will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. RESULTS: In September 2021, our search strategy identified 18,002 studies for the CPD-related research questions after removal of duplicates. Of these, 509 records were screened based on their title, and 66 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility based on their abstract, of which 31 met the inclusion criteria. A further 291 articles were identified as relevant to the ROP research questions. Of these, 87 records were screened based on their title, and 46 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility based on their abstract, of which 8 studies met our inclusion criteria. CONCLUSIONS: This protocol outlines the scope and methodology that will be used to conduct a systematic review of evidence for CPD and ROP and inform a review of the standards for regulated health professionals in Australia. Previous research has shown that while CPD improves practitioner knowledge, the link to public safety is unclear. While there has been a greater focus on maintenance of certification and other quality assurance activities over the past 10 years, there remains great variability in CPD requirements across both professions and jurisdictions. ROP was found to be a poorly researched area with most research concentrating on medical practitioners, nurses, and midwives and no clear consensus about the optimal time period after which retraining or an assessment of competence should be introduced. As the CPD and ROP standards are currently under review, it is timely that a review of current evidence be undertaken. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/28625.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.137 | 0.173 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.052 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".