ABSTRACT
Societal trends such as an aging population, rapidly expanding medical knowledge, and the training of smaller cohorts of new physicians (for economic reasons) make it imperative that the current practitioners not only maintain but also improve upon their professional competence throughout their working lives. The result of this trend is that greater numbers of doctors are choosing to continue their work at advanced ages. So, an important and still unanswered question is, In what way does age manifest its effect on medical competence? Is it possible that experience prevails and individuals keep performing as well as they did in their younger years? Or, are certain skills maintained with age, whereas other abilities, such as the fine motor precision required of a surgeon, inevitably decline? Knowledge about how successful physicians improve upon and maintain their expert performance should result in improved training and retraining methods, which, in turn, should promote more effective use of professional resources.
