Design and administration of a continuing education policy.

Personnel development by the laboratory administrator depends on well-established continuing education policies and procedures. This article assists in defining those policies and procedures, based on the authors' experience in developing a continuing education policy for a hospital laboratory. Ten categories of acceptable laboratory continuing education are defined, and a method for assigning credit to each category is presented. A decision-making scheme is outlined for distributing resources (such as time and money) for continuing education. The process for documenting and monitoring employee participation is described.