Who Owns Veterinary Continuing Education? Part 1: Applying human medicine principles to our profession (#474)

If you pick up the program for almost any major veterinary conference, you’ll see two things very quickly:

• A long list of talks that qualify for CE hours, and

• A dense forest of corporate logos.

We’ve grown so used to this that it barely registers.

It goes without saying that pharma, pet-food, diagnostics and corporate practice groups support our education.

Of course, we sit through sponsored dinners and branded webinars to earn our hours.

But who really owns our continuing education?

And who should?

In human medicine, this question has been tackled head-on. In 2010, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) published a major report, Redesigning Continuing Education in the Health Professions, that basically concluded:

The current CE system is fragmented, too focused on counting hours, heavily dependent on commercial funding, and only weakly linked to actual improvements in patient care.

Sound familiar?

The recommendations from that report are uncannily relevant to veterinary medicine, especially if we’re serious about monitoring and re-balancing corporate input into our CE.

What the US IOM Got Worried About

The US IOM report identified several flaws in human-health CE that will sound very familiar to veterinarians:

• Box-ticking instead of learning

• Professionals and employers focus on meeting regulatory requirements rather than identifying genuine knowledge or performance gaps.

• Old-fashioned delivery

• CE is largely didactic - lectures and seminars, on fixed schedules, with teacher-driven content that may or may not relate to real clinical problems.

• Siloed and fragmented

• Each profession, specialty and state runs its own system. Regulation and accreditation are all over the map.

• Weak science

• We have surprisingly little solid evidence about which CE methods change practice and improve outcomes, or how much CE is the right amount.

• Heavy commercial funding

• In medicine and pharmacy, pharmaceutical and device companies took a lead role in financing CE, raising persistent concerns about conflicts of interest and subtle promotional influence.

The US  IOM’s conclusion was blunt:

If your CE system is heavily funded and shaped by commercial interests, regulated mainly by counting hours, and poorly evaluated, you should not expect it to reliably produce high-quality, safe, evidence-based care.

From CE to CPD

One of the most important moves in the report is conceptual. It suggests we stop thinking in narrow CE hours and start thinking in terms of Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

CPD is a broader, lifelong process that is:

• Learner-driven rather than provider-driven,

• Tailored to the individual’s real practice and performance gaps,

• Grounded in adult-learning principles and real-world data,

• Integrated into day-to-day clinical work (not just conference halls), and

• Explicitly aimed at improving patient outcomes and system quality.

CPD still includes formal courses and conferences, but it also embraces audit and feedback, morbidity/mortality review, quality-improvement projects, case-based learning in practice, inter-professional team training, and the use of electronic health data to identify where we (and our hospitals) fall short and need to learn.

For veterinary medicine, that’s immediately attractive.

It moves us from

I need 20 hours by December - what’s cheapest and easiest?

to

I’m struggling with spectrum-of-care conversations in a corporate pressure cooker; my practice has high post-op infection rates in TPLOs; my nurses feel frozen out of medical decision-making. What learning activities will help us fix those things?

Where Corporate Input Enters the Picture

In human health, the US IOM worried about two linked issues:

Who pays for CE and who shapes it?

They noted:

• Commercial funding formed a very large share of CE income in some sectors.

• Even with conflict-of-interest rules and disclosure, subtle promotional bias can creep into topic selection, speaker choice, framing of evidence, and planted questions from the audience.

• Professional societies themselves may have conflicts: they rely on corporate sponsorship and logos on the program while also claiming to be neutral providers of education.

That is uncomfortably close to where veterinary CE finds itself.

In the veterinary world:

• Many conferences and webinars simply wouldn’t exist in their current form without corporate sponsors.

• Entire streams of CE can be dominated by a small cluster of companies (pharma, pet food, diagnostics, insurance, corporate practice groups).

• Topics that directly challenge high-margin products or business models often struggle to find a slot, or a sponsor.

• Speakers may be chosen because they are on message, not because they offer the most critical or balanced perspective.

This doesn’t mean corporate-sponsored CE is automatically bad.

As the US IOM report points out, commercially linked organizations can bring well-trained staff, logistical support, and high-quality materials.

The problem is unchecked influence, which may occur when those who stand to profit from our prescribing or referral patterns also pay for, and shape, the very education we need to stay competent.

What the US IOM Recommends and How It Translates to Vet Med

The US IOM’s solution was to propose a public–private Continuing Professional Development Institute (CPDI).

An independent body responsible for:

• Coordinating CE/CPD across professions,

• Setting high-level standards for regulation and accreditation,

• Strengthening the science of what works,

• Aligning CE funding with the goals of quality and safety, and

• Developing robust conflict-of-interest policies and monitoring.

Crucially, they argued that:

• Funding whose primary goal is not improved quality and safety should be restricted from directly supporting CPD.

• Conflicted funds (e.g., corporate money) could, at most, be pooled and allocated by a neutral body, not by the companies themselves.

• The CPDI should set national standards for licensing, certification, credentialing, and accreditation bodies and accredit the accreditors, including monitoring them over time.

When translated into the real world of veterinary medicine, we can visualize a veterinary CPD system in which:

• Corporate players cannot directly buy influence over content,

• Anyone funding education does so under strict rules that put animal welfare and professional integrity first,

• There is an independent body that sets standards for CE providers and monitors them, and

• Our regulatory focus shifts from hours earned to competence demonstrated and outcomes improved.

I admit this is a tall order. However, I submit that the goals are attainable, aimed at not only ensuring that CPD lives up to its definition, but that the profession, and the people and animals it serves, benefit.

Step One: Make Corporate Influence Visible

Before we can control corporate input into veterinary CE, we must be able to see it.

Inspired by the IOM’s emphasis on monitoring accreditors and financing, a veterinary CPD framework could require at a minimum the following:

1. Full, standardized disclosure for every CE activity

• Who paid for it (all sources and amounts)?

• Who selected the topic?

• Who chose the speaker?

• What financial ties do speakers, planners and organizers have to related companies?

2. A public CE/CPD registry

• Conferences, webinars, online modules and in-house trainings listed in a central database.

• Each entry tagged with its funding model: independent, pooled, single-sponsor, in-kind support only, etc.

• Searchable by species, topic, region, sponsor type.

3. Routine monitoring for bias

• Not just end-of-session Was there commercial bias? tick-boxes (the IOM notes participants are not always great at spotting it).

• Periodic independent review of slide decks and recorded sessions by panels with no financial ties to the sponsors.

• Flags raised where evidence is cherry-picked, alternatives are ignored, or guidelines are presented without nuance.

4. Separation of education and marketing

• Clear physical and programmatic separation between scientific sessions and promotional symposia.

• No tying of CE credit to attendance at explicitly promotional events.

• No planted questions or ghost-written talks.

5. Annual transparency reports

• Just as the IOM envisions the CPDI reporting regularly to stakeholders, a veterinary CPD body could publish yearly data:

• Percentage of CE hours funded directly by industry,

• Distribution of topics (e.g., chronic disease management vs new product launches),

• Trends over time.

None of these steps bans corporate involvement.

They simply put it under light, label it clearly, and create the conditions in which independent education can flourish.

Step Two: Align Funding with Animal Welfare and Professional Integrity

The IOM’s financing chapter offers a simple but powerful principle:

CPD funding should be directly aligned with improved quality of care and patient safety, and free from conflicts of interest wherever possible.

For veterinary medicine, that could mean:

• Encouraging employer-funded and profession-funded CPD, with tax incentives or regulatory credit.

• Developing neutral pooled-fund models where companies contribute to a common education pot that is governed by an independent board, not by the donors.

• Prioritizing grants for practice-based quality-improvement projects and rigorous evaluation of what actually changes veterinary behavior and outcomes.

• Making it progressively more difficult to claim CE credit for events where the educational design is inseparable from product promotion.

The IOM also stresses that there is probably enough money already in the system. It is just poorly aligned and sometimes wasted on low-value activities.

The same is almost certainly true in veterinary medicine: we are not short of dollars; we are short of governance.

Step Three: Think System, Not Individual Talk

The IOM report reminds us that no single lecture or webinar, no matter how good, can fix a broken system.

What’s needed is a coherent CPD system that:

• Spans from graduation to retirement,

• Involves all members of the veterinary team (nurses, technicians, managers, assistants),

• Links CE activities to real practice data (complications, client complaints, antibiotic usage, euthanasia decisions, spectrum-of-care choices), and

• Is overseen by a body with both independence and accountability.

That’s where the idea of a veterinary CPD institute or council comes in. An analog of the CPDI the IOM proposes for human health professions.

It could be public–private, international or national, but its duties would look familiar:

• Set CPD standards and accredit the accreditors.

• Define robust conflict-of-interest rules and monitor compliance.

• Maintain the CE registry and publish transparency reports.

• Commission and synthesize research on what actually works in veterinary CPD.

• Promote inter-professional team learning and practice-based improvement.

If that sounds ambitious, it is. But as the IOM notes, the status quo will not spontaneously evolve into a high-functioning CPD system. It takes deliberate design.

Where This Series Is Heading

This Blog post is just a starting point.

In later parts of this series, I’d like to explore:

• Part 2 – Counting Hours vs Measuring Impact: How we might move veterinary regulators, specialty colleges and employers from CE points to outcome-focused CPD.

• Part 3 – Corporate CE and Spectrum of Care: How sponsorship can narrow the spectrum, and how a CPD lens can reopen it.

• Part 4 – Designing a Veterinary CPD Observatory: A concrete proposal for a monitoring and transparency body, with practical metrics and dashboards.

For now, the key question I’d invite you to think about is this:

If a substantial proportion of our veterinary education is designed, funded or subtly steered by entities whose primary obligation is to shareholders, can we honestly say our CE system is aligned with animals, clients and the profession?

Human medicine has already done much of the analytical work for us. Our task is to adapt those principles - transparency, independence, outcomes-focus, and system-level design - to the veterinary world before the corporate tide shapes our learning beyond recognition.

Addendum: Where AAVSB and RACE Fit In

Whenever we ask: Who owns veterinary continuing education? we also must talk about the American Association of Veterinary State Boards (AAVSB) and its Registry of Approved Continuing Education (RACE) program, because, in North America at least, that’s the framework we all live inside.

RACE was created by the AAVSB to develop and apply uniform standards for veterinary continuing education.

RACE is used by three main groups:

• State and provincial licensing boards (to support their CE requirements),

• Veterinary professionals (to find CE that will likely count), and

• CE providers (to demonstrate that they meet the standards member boards expect).

RACE-approved programs are widely recognized as meeting baseline quality expectations and are accepted, often without additional review, by dozens of US states and Canadian provinces.

That is a real achievement. Without some kind of shared approval system, every state board would have to vet every conference, webinar and online module individually.

RACE reduces administrative friction, sets minimum expectations for subject matter and presenter qualifications, and provides a centralized way to track hours through tools like

RACEtrack.

At the same time, it’s worth being clear about what RACE does not do.

The RACE Standards explicitly state that the objective of the program is to review CE that maintains or increases knowledge, skills and professional performance, but that RACE does not accredit, endorse or certify any program or person, and RACE approval does not validate the content of the program.

The RACE committee, made up of volunteer veterinarians and technicians (often current or former board members), focuses on whether the proposed program meets the published standards: appropriate subject matter, clear objectives, qualified presenters, acceptable delivery method, and correct credit calculation.

In other words, RACE is a structural and procedural gatekeeper, not a deep scientific or ethical seal of approval.

RACE tells you that a course looks like CE in form and that basic safeguards are in place, but not necessarily that the content is unbiased, independent, or impactful in practice.

On the corporate front, the RACE Standards do attempt to draw a line between education and marketing. Programs that are primarily to market a product or service are not supposed to be approved.

Product-focused or company-focused sessions can be considered for RACE-approval if they:

• Clearly separate marketing from education,

• Provide sufficient scientific or clinical content useful even to attendees who don’t use that product, and

• Make the relationships between provider, presenter and company transparent at the outset, with formal conflict-of-interest disclosure.

The standards also emphasize that neither AAVSB nor RACE endorses any products mentioned in approved programs and that corporate-employed presenters must meet the same subject-matter criteria as any other speaker.

These are important guardrails, and they are stronger than what exists in some other sectors.

But again, they have limits.

RACE:

• Approves hours, not outcomes. It calculates CE credit based on time spent and delivery method (e.g., 50–60 minutes of instruction per credit), not on demonstrated changes in practice or animal outcomes.

• Reviews applications, not ecosystems. It evaluates individual programs against standards, but does not publish system-level data on how much of our CE is industry-funded, which topics are over- or under-represented, or whether sponsorship patterns are shaping the spectrum of care.

• Focuses on minimum acceptability, not strategic direction. Its job is to help boards ensure that licensees complete legitimate CE, not to decide whether the overall balance of our CPD portfolio serves animal welfare, professional wellbeing or societal needs.

So where does that leave us?

From the perspective of this series, the AAVSB and RACE are absolutely necessary, but in my opinion, not nearly sufficient.

They provide an essential baseline: a common language around CE hours, categories (medical vs non-medical), delivery methods, and presenter qualifications; clear rules against blatantly promotional events; and infrastructure that makes it feasible for state boards to require ongoing education at all.

What RACE was never designed to do, and what the Institute of Medicine report challenges us to imagine, is to function as a comprehensive CPD system that:

• Looks beyond hours to actual changes in practice and outcomes,

• Actively monitors the overall pattern of corporate funding and topic emphasis, and

• Aligns continuing education with broader goals like spectrum of care, ethical practice and team well being.

In that sense, the proposed Veterinary CPD Institute or Observatory in later parts of this series is not a criticism of RACE so much as a next step.

RACE gives us a foundation.

A CPD-wide, outcome-focused, transparency-driven framework would help us complete the rest of the building.

Until then, when we see the words RACE approved on a program, we should read them as:

This course meets agreed minimum standards and is likely to satisfy licensing boards.

Useful, important, but not the end of the conversation about who owns veterinary continuing education, and certainly not a substitute for our own critical judgment about content, influence and impact.

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