How do you design professional development for clinicians who are already stretched? With clinical teams under constant time pressure, healthcare education needs to be easier to access, quicker to complete and more closely connected to the realities of practice.
In this webinar Abisola Amoo from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and Matt Smith from the Royal College of Midwives to explore what good CPD looks like when learning has to fit into the pace of clinical work.
Watch The Webinar
So here are three shifts that will shape how you design and deliver professional development for busy healthcare professionals.
Design for the time clinicians actually have
- Clinicians are not always sitting at a desk with an hour set aside for learning. CPD often needs to fit into short gaps between clinical commitments, lunch breaks or time on the move.
- Bite-sized learning is becoming increasingly important. Matt Smith describes the Royal College of Midwives’ “coffee time learning”: short, flexible modules designed to take around 10–15 minutes.
- Shorter does not mean thinner. The challenge is to keep learning focused while still protecting the clinical substance, evidence base and patient safety implications of the topic.
- Low-friction access matters. If a learner has ten minutes available and spends the first two trying to log in, find the right module or make the platform work on mobile, the moment is lost.
- Longer modules still have a place, but they need to be navigable. Let learners dip into the section they need, rather than forcing a linear journey that serves completion data better than clinical usefulness.
Choose the right format, not the default format
- Online delivery is now the norm for many healthcare education teams. At the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health around 95% of its courses are now online since the shift prompted by COVID.
- Online formats can help colleges and education providers reach wider audiences, reduce travel and overhead costs, and make it easier for busy clinicians to contribute as speakers or learners.
- Webinars can be a useful starting point for testing demand. If a topic attracts strong interest, it can then be developed into a fuller course, live programme or blended pathway.
- Face-to-face learning still has a role where the subject matter, skills, safeguarding considerations or networking value justify it. The question is no longer “online or in person?” but “what does this learning need to achieve?”
- Blended models can support different preferences and contexts, combining webinars, virtual classrooms, self-paced learning, leadership programmes and in-person sessions where they add genuine value.
Make learning practical, relevant and future-ready
- Busy clinicians need learning they can use in practice. That means real-world scenarios, case-based discussion and lived experience, not abstract content that feels disconnected from the clinical environment.
- Learner feedback should shape the offer. Member surveys, post-course feedback and engagement data can all help identify what clinicians actually need, rather than relying only on what committees assume they need.
- Abisola highlights the value of case-based programmes such as national grand rounds, where expert clinicians explore real scenarios and help delegates connect learning to patient care, safety and efficiency.
- Technology and AI will play a growing role, but they should support practice rather than distract from it. Used well, technology can help deliver more personalised, role-specific and just-in-time learning.
- The risk is chasing novelty at the expense of trust. Flashy tools are not enough if the content is clinically weak, hard to apply or poorly aligned to learners’ real roles.
The full webinar explores these themes in more depth, with practical examples from the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health on how to make professional development more accessible, relevant and useful for time-pressured clinicians.
