CE Program Improvement

As a CE Provider, your goal is to produce quality courses that meet your learners’ needs. But how do you know that you’ve met that goal? How do you know what’s working and where changes are needed? Results from your program improvement process will help.

What It Looks Like

Providers need to regularly evaluate and improve their continuing education (CE) program. You may consider the following sources to inform overall program improvement:

1. Needs assessment data
2. Individual course evaluations
3. Learner assessment results
4. Feedback from course planners and instructors
5. Information from other data sources—such as social media, emails, or feedback forms

Although you must include a learner assessment for every course, you don’t have to evaluate every course. Instead, you should have a plan for when and how you’ll evaluate courses to help improve the whole program. The same is true for other data sources—develop a plan that works for your program.

Here are some resources that may help as you create or refine your program improvement plan:

• Continuous Improvement Process: A 6 Steps Guide to Implementing PDCA
• Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Plan Template
• Post Event Survey Questions That Increase the Value of Attendee Feedback
• Quality Improvement Toolkit (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)
• What Is the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle?

When It Happens

Program improvement is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. Continuous improvement happens by regularly comparing what is planned (intended outcomes) with what happens (actual outcomes). By looking at the difference between these two, you can figure out what changes you need to make to ensure that your CE program meets its goals.

How It Supports Compliance

Standard 1.2.2 requires Providers to “demonstrate efforts toward program improvement, including the use of data from needs assessments, learner assessments, and program evaluations from previous courses.”

Providers are not required to produce evidence of program improvement to ASHA CE unless requested; however, the expectation is that Providers have a program improvement plan in place. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) gives examples of what they would consider compliant and noncompliant with their program improvement rule. These examples reflect the types of information that ASHA CE would expect to see, if requested.

Why It Matters

A CE program that isn’t striving to continuously improve risks failure. Regularly reviewing available data and making changes to processes, procedures, and systems will help you:

• streamline and simplify tasks
• ensure course quality
• make changes that better meet learner needs
• improve customer and personnel satisfaction
• reduce risk and maintain compliance
• grow your program

Bottom Line

​Providers need to understand how well their program is working—and then identify areas of improvement. A clear program improvement plan, conducted regularly, supports these goals.