Views of General Practitioners and Clinical Medical School Faculty to Adapt the Educational needs of Continuing Medical Education programs

Continuing education is a necessity in the world. To develop educational programs in the first step, educational needs must be properly identified. To train general practitioners (GPs), the present study was conducted at Golestan University of Medical Sciences in order to assess the needs of continuing education programs in view of general practitioners participating in the programs as well as the clinical faculty members’ instructor of these programs. 

The present study is a descriptive study. To achieve the objectives of the study and considering the necessity of these groups of educational programs and work experience of the subjects, the opinions were examined based on a 4-part questionnaire consists of “clinical examinations”, “paraclinical measures”, ”therapeutic measures”, “emergency measures in treating patients” topics. The results were evaluated by SPSS-18 software.

According to the results, general practitioners (n=410) and faculty members’ instructors of workshops (n=204) had the same oponion on 2 topics: “therapeutic measures” and “emergency measures in treating patients”. The common issues related to the mentioned topics are included “logical prescribing of antibiotics” and “cardiopulmonary resuscitation”, respectively. Based on Spearmanchr('39')s test, it was shown that there was a significant positive correlation between the opinions of these two groups only in the following issues: “interpretation of radiological stereotypes”, “emergency measures in ear, nose and throat diseases” and “emergency measures in burns”.

Based on the results, in order to determine the actual educational needs, continuing education planners should consider the opinions of the GPs in addition to the opinions of experts.