ARTICLE
7 December 2015

LifeTrain: Driving lifelong learning for biomedical pro fessionals 

Cath Brooksbank1 Christa Janko2 Claire Johnson1 Wolf See3 Hans H. Lindén4 Mike Hardman5*
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1 European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinx ton, CB10 1SD, UK
2 EMTRAIN Project Office, Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
3 Bayer Pharma AG, Muellerstrasse 178, D-13353 Berlin, Germany
4 European Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Veddesta Business Center, SE-175 72 Järfälla, Sweden
5 AstraZeneca, Innovative Medicines, Mereside Alderley Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK10 4TG, UK
JMDS 2017 , 2(1), 41–47; https://doi.org/10.18063/jmds.v1i2.123
Submitted: 3 September 2015 | Revised: 23 November 2015 |
© 2017 by the Author(s). Licensee Whioce Publishing, Singapore. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

This article describes LifeTrain — the European common framework for continuing professional development in the biomedical sciences. An important goal of LifeTrain is to support biomedical professionals to work collaboratively across disciplines, sectors and national boundaries. LifeTrain is an open community with a unifying goal; it brings together many excellent, but disparate, activities into a process towards establishing a focused and coherent framework for continuing professional development in the biomedical sciences. This collaborative approach provides the critical mass to make a major contribution to strengthen the skills and competencies of biomedical professionals in a rapidly changing environment. LifeTrain's signatories, which include multinational pharmaceutical companies, research infrastructures, professional and scientific bodies, higher-education institutes and research institutes, have agreed to the principles of the framework and to continue to collaborate to implement LifeTrain. We warmly invite others to join us.

Keywords
lifelong learning
continuing professional development
LifeTrain
competence
biomedical science
References

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Conflict of interest
No conflict of interest has been reported by the authors.
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