The Saint Thomas Health Services (STHS) Continuing Healthcare Education Program has as its primary purpose the improvement of patient health care at Saint Thomas Hospital, Baptist Hospital, Middle Tennessee Medical Center, and Hickman Community Hospital-all members of Saint Thomas Health Services-through the education of physicians and other health professionals so as to maintain health care of the highest quality. Saint Thomas Health Services views medical education as a lifelong, continuous and ongoing process throughout the professional career of the health care provider.

STHS and its affiliated hospitals offer a full range of specialty and subspecialty education, with emphasis on cardiac care, orthopaedic surgery, obstetrics, women’s health, pulmonary medicine, oncology, vascular medicine, neurosciences, emergency services and adult and pediatric medicine. As such, CME activities have a concentration in those clinical disciplines. Additional CME activities are provided for all specialties as educational needs are identified.

STHS develops CME activities for the following groups and medical specialists: Medical Staff members at Baptist Hospital, Saint Thomas Hospital, Middle Tennessee Medical Center, and Hickman Community Hospital, and other physicians in those communities:

• Orthopaedic surgeons, cardiologists and cardiac surgeons, emergency physicians, oncologists, neurologists and neurosurgeons, internal medicine and its subspecialties, and obstetricians and gynecologists, and vascular surgeons in the Eastern United States
  
• Primary care physicians in middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky
  
• Other medical specialties as needs are identified

A variety of educational strategies are used, as follows:

• Formal courses
  
• Skill workshops
  
• Live seminars, symposia, and conferences
  
• Regularly scheduled conferences, such as departmental teaching conferences and grand rounds
  
• Jointly sponsored activities with health care related organizations that the various STHS’s CME Committees deem appropriate to the CME mission (the Center only joint sponsor those activities that satisfy a clinically important educational need and for which there is an agreement to abide by the requirements of the ACCME and the STHS)
  
• Enduring materials such as clinical journals and web-delivered programs
  
• Innovative educational formats and delivery systems