About Us:

History

The Research and Development Resource Base (RDRB) is a bibliographic database of literature that began over 25 years ago as a hard copy review of about 200 papers in continuing medical education called “The impact of CME: An annotated bibliography”. The focus was the delivery and evaluation of continuing education in the health professions, also incorporating information about practitioner performance in such areas as prescribing behaviors, and health care outcomes. While initially designed around the specifics of continuing education, the field grew to include all interventions, for example, those structured to change practice behavior, optimize performance, and implement guidelines.

The RDRB Today

The RDRB has further expanded and now houses a collection of literature for 3 distinct yet inter-related fields:

• Continuing Education & Knowledge Translation
• Interprofessional Literature
• Faculty Development

Each article in the RDRB has extensive keywords, and many offer a link to a short abstract or summary. Searches can be broadly based or very specific, depending on the selection of keywords.

The RDRB offers information covering general areas such as the following:

• Interventions: Studies and reports of educational events, activities, programs, and other maneuvers designed to increase learning, or produce performance change
• Learning Environments: Factors external to the health professional that influence learning and change. Topic areas include re-certification, mandatory continuing education, and practice sites
• Learner Characteristics: Factors that affect health professional learning and change, including personal characteristics such as motivation, gender, or age of the learner
• Needs Assessment: Surveys of health professional needs, need assessment techniques, and instruments
• Evaluation: Techniques, strategies, and methods to evaluate, eg., instrument or survey development, application of statistical analysis
• Organization and Delivery: Descriptive studies of the organization of large scale programs, including administration, funding, and logistical support
• Knowledge Translation: Materials that include a larger overview of activities including public health education, patient education, and organizational learning
• Miscellaneous: Papers and reports on issues relevant to history, development, or ethical considerations

Scope

Continuing Education & Knowledge Translation - The fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and other allied health professions are covered while focusing specifically on Continuing Education and Knowledge Translation for practitioners.

The materials selected follow the general areas listed directly above and coverage is worldwide, however most records are from English-language sources or have English abstracts.

Faculty Development - The Faculty Development portion of RDRB had its start in 2003 when the Centre for Faculty Development was formed in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. It was created and continues to be updated in collaboration with the library of the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto. It holds more than 1700 listings in the form of journal articles, books, conference proceedings, and reports as suggested and endorsed by staff from the Centre for Faculty Development. The content of the records focuses on many health education topics, including:

• administrative, management and organizational development
• academic career management
• gender and cultural issues
• communication skills
• mentoring and coaching
• professionalism
• teaching and learning - includes resources which relate to audiovisual techniques for teaching, evaluation of students and teaching, teaching skills and strategies, learning styles, and much more

Resources may be found through a search by keyword, publication name or author name. Many references include links to abstract and some to full text.

Partners

Participating in the maintenance and ongoing development of the RDRB include the following groups:

• Centre for Faculty Development, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto at St. Michael's Hospital
• Continuing Education & Professional Development, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
• The Knowledge Translation Program at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto
• Learning Resource Centre, The Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences, Toronto
• Office of Interprofessional Education, University of Toronto
• AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges), Washington, DC

Supporters

We gratefully acknowledge re-development funding and ongoing assistance for the RDRD from our supporters:

• The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)
• The Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (Alliance)
• The Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME)
• The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC)
• Canadian Association for Continuing Health Education (CACHE)
• The Knowledge Translation Program at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital
• Continuing Education & Professional Development, University of Toronto