South African health practitioners’ patterns of CPD practices – implications for maintenance of licensure

Background. The statutory requirement for continuing professional development (CPD) for all health professionals registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) has been in place since 2007. The HPCSA intends to implement maintenance of licensure (MoL).Objectives. To determine practitioners’ perceptions and experiences of engaging with CPD to inform the development of the MoL system.Methods. A cross-sectional survey of practitioners registered with the HPCSA was conducted. The self-administered 30-item electronic questionnaire covered practitioner demographics and patterns of CPD practice and was completed by 11 307 respondents.Results. Methods used to determine learning needs included self-assessment (56.8%) and audit of own practice (53.2%). Selection of CPD activities was based on interest (80.2%) and expertise (72.8%) and less so on gaps in knowledge (66.1%) and skills (61.8%). The most frequent learning activities were primarily didactic (workshops (58%), lectures (53%) and conferences (51%)). Barriers included cost and location of CPD activities, especially for women and rural practitioners (p<0.001). Employer support for CPD was associated with adherence (p<0.001). There was strong support (88.7%) for continuing education as a component of MoL, but less support (<50%) for other elements, even though practitioners voluntarily engaged with these practices.Conclusion. Respondents engage in a range of activities that could be incorporated into a MoL system. The transition to MoL requires development of tools, including objective assessments, guidelines for individualised learning programmes and expanding the range of learning activities. Strategies to address barriers to CPD need to be considered

Magnetic Fields in the Milky Way

This chapter presents a review of observational studies to determine the magnetic field in the Milky Way, both in the disk and in the halo, focused on recent developments and on magnetic fields in the diffuse interstellar medium. I discuss some terminology which is confusingly or inconsistently used and try to summarize current status of our knowledge on magnetic field configurations and strengths in the Milky Way. Although many open questions still exist, more and more conclusions can be drawn on the large-scale and small-scale components of the Galactic magnetic field. The chapter is concluded with a brief outlook to observational projects in the near future.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, to appear in "Magnetic Fields in Diffuse Media", eds. E.M. de Gouveia Dal Pino and A. Lazaria

First sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope results. VI. Testing the black hole metric

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Resolving the inner parsec of the blazar J1924-2914 with the event horizon telescope

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A universal power-law prescription for variability from synthetic images of black hole accretion flows

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First sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope results. IV. Variability, morphology, and black hole mass

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Millimeter light curves of sagittarius A* observed during the 2017 Event Horizon Telescope campaign

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First M87 Event Horizon Telescope results. IX.: detection of near-horizon circular polarization

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Characterizing and mitigating intraday variability: reconstructing source structure in accreting black holes with mm-VLBI

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First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope results. I. The shadow of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way

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