Introduction:

The knowledge society is growing in an accelerated manner and, also, is aging rapidly, which contributes to the necessity of learning how to manage knowledge and demands to favor the permanent improvement of health professionals, in order to turn them into a human talent resource with high knowledge for responding to the most pressing health needs.

Objective:

To characterize the permanent improvement of health professionals in Cuba.

Methods:

A documental review was carried out on the continuing education of health professionals, through the Scopus, SciELO, CUMED, LILACS, Virtual Health Library, and PubMed databases, in Spanish and English, by means of the information search engine Google Scholar. Twenty scientific articles of sufficient quality and current relevance concerning the proposed objective were selected, for which the historical-logical theoretical method of scientific research was applied. The following words were used for the search: educación de posgrado [postgraduate education], superación profesional [professional improvement] and superación permanente [permanent improvement].

Results:

Permanent improvement, a particular process of postgraduate education for health professionals, has been studied by different authors. This comprises a system oriented to professional enrichment for continuously updating, broadening and deepening knowledge in order to raise general comprehensive culture and fulfill professional performance with quality.

Conclusions:

The systematization carried out on the permanent improvement of health professionals guarantees the updating of knowledge and skills, which allows raising the quality of competence and performance of health service providers to the population.

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