Oral Presentation Clinical Oncology Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting 2017

Using Education to Disseminate and implement Guidelines   (#129)

Ian N Olver 1
  1. Sansom Institute for Health Research, UniSA, Adelaide, SA, Australia

The methodology to produce evidence-based clinical practice guidelines is well described. However, the best method of ensuring uptake of guidelines is not as clear. One strategy is to ensure that the working party which produces the guidelines has broad representation of the end-users and in turn of colleges and professional organisations so that have some ownership of the guidelines and help disseminate them to their members, and encourage adherence. The transition from paper to digital guidelines like those on wiki platforms aids the ready dissemination of the guidelines. Options to promote uptake of the guidelines have included interactive educational meetings, decision support tools which provide prompts, audit and feedback, the utilisation of opinion leaders, mass media campaigns, the use of consumers to advocate for evidence based treatment and various administrative strategies using penalties or incentives. Social media has been tried but may not improve upon print, email or internet base methods. We postulated that creating education modules based on the guideline recommendations in a format that had proven successful for educating clinicians, may make the guideline recommendation part of the core knowledge of the clinicians and make it more likely that their clinical practice would adhere to the guideline recommendations. We pilot tested this using Qstream case-based modules based on lung cancer guidelines. Two questions were provided every second day and repeated in 6 days for incorrect answers and 10 days if correct. Questions were retired when answered twice correctly. All participants attested to the effectiveness of the process for learning and further testing is needed to assess uptake of the guidelines.