This issue of The Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions is devoted to a consideration of the continuum of professional education. Although education is clearly a lifelong, multifactorial assimilation of experience, for our purposes, we have defined the continuum as existing from the point of admission to professional education in any of the health professions, across undergraduate and graduate education and throughout a lifetime of learning throughout practice.
While this concept of lifelong learning across a continuum has been an explicit goal of medical and other health professional education programs, in fact, the components of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education have been maintained quite separately, with different goals, accreditation processes, funding, and desired outcomes. In this issue, we hope to stimulate you to think about some of the aspects of professional education that may be common across the continuum rather than separate and unique. To accomplish this goal, we have tried to undertake two initiatives. First, we have tried to elicit and describe and synthesize the state of the art in selected aspects of education and medical education. On reviewing the literature, it seems that, in some areas, such as faculty development, research and development have been concentrated mainly in one area, in this example, undergraduate professional education. The findings, and the many excellent ideas that result, have not been