Global Trends in Interest in Continuing Professional Development in Healthcare

Abstract

The interests of modern society in continuing professional development (CPD) is being reshaped by digitalization and the emergence of new demands for lifelong learning. However, these changes may vary significantly across different sectors, which is of critical importance to the operation of the business model of providers of professional development services. This research aims to assess trends in interest in CPD in healthcare in the world using modern Google Trends technologies. Google Trends is a web application designed to analyse the search behavior of Google users. Google Trends technology allows to obtain quantitative and qualitative indicators of Google user search queries across different countries and enables the identification current trends over a specified time period. To search for global related trends, the reporting indicators from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) were utilized for countries leading in the number of search queries for the term „CPD in healthcare“. There was a stable level of search activity of Google users related to CPD. A significant advantage of search queries in English for the term "CPD in healthcare" in Google was recorded in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. The assessment of queries showed that from 2004 to 2026, there was a trend of increasing interest in continuing medical education among Google users worldwide, with a significant increase in interest in recent years, especially after 2025. In July 2026, an analysis of interest in the topic of research among the English medium audience of Google users over the past 3 months was repeated. Conclusion: Determining the global priority of CPD in the field of healthcare enables higher medical education institutions worldwide to be competitive and realize the advantages of existing fundamental medical schools in the current conditions of a shortage of medical personnel in the world and increasing interest in training in medical specialties. Using the Google Trends web application can be an additional tool for assessing interest in CPD of healthcare rofessionals for the planning of activities by education providers. Contribution: Conceptualization, methodology, investigation, writing, I.S., O.P; visualization, O.P. Novelty: The study captures real-time, global search behaviors as digital proxies to uantify and nowcast the escalating worldwide institutional demand for continuous professional development in healthcare.