Abstract:

Introduction:
Medicine and rehabilitation are among the most rapidly changing fields of science and practice. To assure quality of patient care, medical doctors and healthcare professionals should always be in touch with the current advances.
The actual financial crisis imposes to medical staff in our country the necessity to work in more than one hospital or medical center. In this situation, the electronic learning with online educational courses and the use of digitalized libraries represent a useful opportunity.

Goal:
Our aim was to investigate the interests of medical doctors and health professionals, working in the field of physical medicine and rehabilitation, to participate in long life learning electronic educational courses in different sub-areas of clinical practice.

Methodology:
We developed an anonymous survey among medical doctors and health professionals, working in the rehabilitation clinical practice.
The questionnaire was sent to different categories of staff: medical doctors (MD) – general practitioners, MD - specialists and residents in Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (PRM), physiotherapists, and nurses.
For the current study, different methods were applied: Screening, Questionnaires, Analysis of documents, Statistics.

Results and discussion:
The total number of the survey participants was 231. Here, we analyze only fully fulfilled questionnaires – 212 (91.77 %).
We observed a significant interest of respondents in e-learning (93 %), especially among the groups under 55 years. The traditional courses and workshops are still preferred formats in the age groups further than 50 years.
As mostly used domains are specified the following: Physical Medicine; Rehabilitation; Neurology; Neurosurgery; Orthopedics and Traumatology; Pain medicine. The outlined topics include: robotic neurorehabilitaion, stroke, back pain, rehabilitation in soft tissue lesions of the shoulder and the knee, rehabilitation after hip and knee arthroplasty, Pain management and physical analgesia, Grasp and Gait analysis and rehabilitation.

Conclusions:
All respondents underlined the significance of implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in medicine and rehabilitation. The fields where ICT is considered as advantageous include: Continuing medical education, Knowledge update, Developing practical skills, Sharing experience with peers, Guiding literature overview. In addition, all learners mentioned the importance of ICT for the constant improvement and knowledge updating. The most interesting domains for our responders include theory and practice of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in neurological and orthopedic diseases, and in neurosurgical and traumatic conditions.
Changes in medical and healthcare theory and practice imposed the needs of development of the medical education. We observed a change in the paradigm – necessity of translation of the traditional educational goals and methods towards development of critical thinking, case-based practical training and problem-solving methods.

Keywords:

Long-life learning, post-graduate education, vocational training, physical medicine, rehabilitation.