Theme
Teaching and learning: the teachers toolkits and context for learning
Category
Postgraduate education and continuing medical education (CME)
INSTITUTION
RMH
Continuous medical education (CME) consists of educational activities in the medical field that is designed by faculty who are experts in certain clinical areas. These educational activities might be live programs, online courses, workshops, small group discussion, academic detailing, written materials, or any activity that serve to maintain, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional competence of health professionals
In summary, pre-educational intervention need assessment and an interactive learning activity is required in designing CME to ensure a positive effect on physician`s knowledge. For sustaining such effect a follow up educational intervention should be planned 6 months to one year later
Recommendations& Implications for future policy and research:
An initial step in planning, and designing an activity for CME or CPD is to conduct a systematic process to determine and address the learning needs of the targeted audiences. This review shows clearly that interactive learning activities such as small group discussion, audit and feed back, and academic detailing are effective in improving physicians` knowledge as compared to didactic, and lecture-based activities. Due to the knowledge decay property of human being a follow-up intervention is advisable to sustain the knowledge gained. Most of the educational studies suggested 6 months to one year post-intervention as the appropriate timing for re-intervention. This review clearly found that the included primary studies in the systematic reviews are of poor quality. This finding calls for future researches of good quality to be able to build a firm inferences from such good quality researches
It is a 2nd Order Systematic Review of the literatures, conducted in an office setting. The study subjects are the Systematic Reviews of a well-designed and properly executed reviews which provide the best evidence on the efficacy of health care interventions.
Inclusion criteria:
The studies will be included if they (were):
- Systematic reviews
- Written in English
- Published after 2004.
- Used CME interventions of a didactic or interactive nature.
- Objectively determining the effect of CME on physician's knowledge.
-
More than 50% of the participants are practicing physicians, or residents in training.
All included studies passed the following stages:
Three screening phases.
Assessment of quality of the systematic review.
Collecting general study characteristics.
Collecting CME activity characteristics.
Compiling studies data for comparison.
We utilize the measurement tool developed by Shea and Colleagues in 2007 to assess the quality of reviews and reported ("A MeaSurment Tool to Assess Reviews"
(AMSTAR))
The search of the electronic databases yielded 184 systematic reviews, while hand Searches yielded 14 systematic reviews. As a total we located 198 systematic reviews. After initial screening of the titles, 127 potentially relevant papers were considered for the second screening of the abstract. This process yielded 54 systematic reviews, which underwent a third screening of the full article to determine wither they satisfied the inclusion criteria. Nine of these studies are found to be relevant. The average quality of the of the included reviews according the AMSTAR were of moderate type. The resulting synthesis can therefore be described as sufficiently robust to sustain the subsequent interpretation and analysis. Participants were primary care physicians (four studies), clinicians ( two studies), resident in training (one study), and obstetrics and gynecologist (one study)
To My wife Dr. Wedad Al-Onazi, for her assisstance in retrieving researches, and to the secretarial staff in the department of Medical Education in College of Medicine in King Saud Ibn Abdulaziz for Health Sciences (COM, KSAU-HS), Mrs Rose and Annabelle, for their valuable administrative support.
Dr. Mohammad Al-Onazi
Dr. Rana Tamim
Prof. Mohi Eldin Majzoub