6-min Microlearning. The new kid on Australia’s independent CPD block.
GP Refresh’s new micro-learning live CPD event format lands in Melbourne this month and Brisbane next, promising GPs their entire annual CPD requirement in a single event.
It’s different in other interesting ways as well.
Two months ago we wrote about GP Refresh as the new kid on Australia’s independent CPD block – a Gold Coast-funded “micro-learning” upstart trying to break into a market that HealthEd, GPCE and Medcast and the RACGP have dominated for decades.
GP Refresh lands in Melbourne on 14–16 August – just over a fortnight away – and then Brisbane on 12–13 September.
Both are shaping up to be the real test of whether this relatively new modern learning format has legs or not with our GP sector.
So what does a GP get for their roughly $990 in registration that they don’t get with the other major face-to-face events offering GP CPD in Australia?
The pitch: 77 topics, 53 CPD hours, two days
GP Refresh’s elevator pitch, if it had one, would be: two days, with the optional pre- and post-event work built in, bank your entire annual CPD requirement in one event (up to 53 hours), cover the most important 77 topics in general practice all reviewed and revised in the last year, by the editor of Murtagh, Dr Justin Coleman, and your content program is entirely independent of sponsor money or influence.
Cleverly, that’s not a head-to-head pitch with either HealthEd or GPCE, the two other major long-term live event players in the market.
It’s a new pitch and a new experience which seems to be targeting a specific cohort of GPs: ones seeking a quick and comprehensive refresh of core topics, independently moderated by a high-level program group, and all their hours done in one event.
HealthEd, the market-leading live GP CPD event, gets you 24 CPD hours with pre- and post-event activities and will cover around 4-6 core topic updates with up to 18 talks, each up to about a half hour, from a spread of some of the country’s best KOLs, all for around $180 (get your promo discount). If it had an elevator pitch it would be: reliable, practical, quality speakers, only one day of your life, and low cost.
GPCE is the closest in format to GP Refresh but still very different.
It runs three days and lands somewhere near the same $990 price point GP Refresh charges for two days, and you can earn either up to 41 hours if you go to all days or choose a lite option and do 19 hours. Both require pre- and post-event work.
All events run an exhibition, with GPCE usually running the biggest and fanciest (read: more pharma sponsors with big stands) – this year they claim 120 exhibitors. GPCE’s DNA was originally an exhibition, not a CPD event.
GP Refresh is the only event where the program has no sponsorship involvement at all. It’s carefully curated by Dr Justin Coleman, the group’s scientific program director, and the co-editor of Murtagh.
Coleman has co-edited the last three editions of Murtagh’s General Practice, the standard clinical reference GPs know simply as “the bible”. He tells TMR he initially got involved because of the new micro-learning format and the clear lines of separation the event has between content orchestration and sponsors.
“The [format] actually makes a lot of difference,” Coleman said noting that it created discipline for both speakers and registrants.
Unlike a read-a-PDF-and-claim-the-hours model, he said, GP Refresh built in verification: “You have to write your responses into a form, and we get [to] see that form, and we check the responses – it’s not take-home reading.”
For GPs who are behind on hours, recently back from leave, or simply drowning in the breadth of what they’re meant to keep current on, the GP Refresh “get it all done in one go” proposition is a pretty unique and good one, he said.
The micro-learning bet
Of all the differences between the events on offer, the micro-learning format – 77 six-minute (occasionally 12-minute) topic slots, run back-to-back across eight themed streams – is perhaps the most interesting development for local GPs.
Micro-learning has a growing evidence base in adult and professional education.
Systematic reviews of the model consistently find that breaking content into short, focused sessions supports retention of specialised knowledge better than marathon-format delivery, particularly for professionals trying to fit learning around full workloads.
Other reviews report that the brevity and targeted design of micro-learning reduce cognitive load and support learner autonomy and long-term retention, while flagging the obvious trade-off: it can struggle with genuinely complex topics unless the content is carefully scaffolded.
That trade-off is exactly what Dr Coleman said the committee spends most of its energy on.
“For me there’s three things with a slide set: one is it’s got to be only six minutes… the second one is the key take-home messages… and the third, which is my own specific bent, it is not [being] influenced by any promotional stuff.”
He described the actual speaker editing process as brutal triage rather than a light touch: presenters will often submit 20 to 40 slides, according to Dr Coleman, who then pares them down to between six and nine slides only.
“I suggest things like, ‘slides nine to 11, maybe no, because they can get that information later on.’”
As to the radical new micro format, even some of the program committee members were sceptical at first.
“My immediate thing was… this is a bit turgid… six minutes, no one’s going to take this,” said Dr Nicole Higgins, one of five content committee members, and a recent past President of the RACGP.
“That was before I watched GPs respond in the room,” she explained.
The consistent feedback since, according to the committee, is that GPs leave each session with something concrete rather than diffuse.
“Everything’s kind of a takeaway,” says Dr Higgins.
Where the pharma question sits
There’s a cohort of GPs simply uncomfortable with the idea that a pharma company might be underwriting a content program, no matter how independently that program might be curated.
GP Refresh’s claim is that there is zero connection between individual sponsors and the program content.
GPCE, with a larger and flashier exhibition hall, is generally seen to be underwritten to a large extent by sponsors, and although HealthEd’s program is built first completely independently by that group’s program director, and then sponsors are asked if they’d like to have a presence at the event based on the topics and KOLs speaking, the connection is there.
Coleman says he wouldn’t have got involved if the GP Refresh content wasn’t entirely independent from scratch.
Of course, a lot of hot topics naturally sit against pharma interests because of new indications and new drugs, such as the recent GLP-1 group of drugs.
However, Dr Coleman feels that even with that natural overlap there needs to be independence.
Dr Coleman also points out that the structure of GP Refresh — with 77 six-minute subtopics across a taxonomy adapted from the Murtagh framework – doesn’t really suit a sponsor model in any case. There’s no obvious slot for a sponsor to buy influence over, even if one wanted to.
But he says that “promotional influence is subtler than a sponsor picking a topic.”
Years spent editing a diabetes journal, he said, taught him to notice the pattern in language doctors with heavy pharma involvement default to — talk of a “secret epidemic” no one’s picked up on, or urgency to “make sure you put them on medication.”
His read isn’t that it’s calculated: “I think it’s subconscious, but it’s learned, as to what’s important in medicine over many years by who you spend your professional conversations with”.
Upcoming dates and offers from each provider
Melbourne:
- GP Refresh 14-16 August; 33% ($900) TMR promo code still on offer HERE (33% ends 5 August, 30% valid thereafter)
- GPCE – on now July 31-August 3; registration HERE
- HealthEd Medical Update September 19; $195 discount offer HERE
Brisbane:
- GP Refresh 12-13 September; 33% TMR promo code ($900) HERE
- GPCE – 12-13 September still on offer HERE
- HealthEd Medical Update September 5; $195 discount offer HERE
Sydney
- HealthEd Medical Update August 15; $195 discount offer HERE
Declaration of interest: GPCE, HealthEd and GP Refresh have all been advertisers with The Medical Republic
