General Practitioners' Perceptions of Continuing Medical Education's Role in Changing Behaviour

Abstract

GPs perform poorly in assessing their specific learning needs. Their behaviour change is likely to be incremental. Therefore multi-faceted interventions and reinforcement from different sources are likely to be most effective in changing clinical practice. Understanding this is important for CME providers, GP Colleges and funders. Narrow, credit-based approaches to CME may discourage time-strapped GPs obtaining motivation to change from exposure to a wide variety of CME sources.

New Zealand community pharmacist attitudes toward opioid-dependent clients

“…Although studies in New Zealand have explored the impact of training on general practitioners (Goodyear-Smith, Whitehorn, & McCormick, 2003), and a recent Cochrane Review assessed the evidence for the effect of educational meetings on professional practice and healthcare outcomes (Thomson O'Brien, Freemantle, Oxman, Wolf, Davis, & Herrin, 2004), no published research exists regarding New Zealand's community pharmacists, their attitudes, practices and training in respect of service provision for drug misusers. While a number of papers have explored this internationally, most have viewed attitudes either in the context of individual attitude statements, or have treated sets of attitude statements using a unidimensional approach-summing attitude statement scores to produce an overall 'attitude score'.…”

Blended learning in CME: the perception of GP trainers

“…In their studies of the perception of GPs on the role of CME, Gagnon et al [32] and Goodyear-Smith et al [33] found time to be the most important barrier; time as constraining factor and having other priorities. In their review of internet versus non-internet courses, Cook et al [34] found that the 'time spent on learning' was similar, although the wide variability suggested that time varied for specific implementations.…”

Knowledge and utilisation of occupational asthma guidelines in primary care

“…They also felt that single events were more likely to effect change if they were of high impact, punitive, or incentive-based. 32 E-mail invitations offering GPs relevant and interactive e-learning modules offer one method of reinforcing and highlighting clinical guidelines in an attempt to effect change in primary care practice.…”