I’ve posted before about Trip’s educational merits. But, in a nutshell, using Trip to help answer clinical questions is undoubtedly educational.
Many health professionals around the globe are required to demonstrate that they are keeping up to date with the latest evidence and the requirements vary widely from country to country. Trip is very keen to help support this and to date we have two main ways:
- The timeline, this records all activity on Trip (search terms used, articles viewed) and can be exported for inclusion in educational portfolios
- Reflective toolbar. This is little used but allows a user to open a document and answer reflective questions about it. This is recorded and is exportable.
But, we want to improve our educational support but require help from our users – hence this post. It has been prompted by me seeing, for a UK-based educational activity, a company offering 1 CPD credit. The notion is that if an activity takes an hour they get 1 CPD credit.
Might such an approach be useful in Trip?
For every article read do we assign a CPD credit? Do we also allow, via the timeline, the ability to reflect on an article to gain extra CPD credit? So, you might read an article and gain 0.5 CPD credits and if you then record your reflections it goes up to 1 CPD.
So, if the above impacts on your professional life please let me know what you think (via jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com). If we get it right it’ll be a huge benefit.
April 3, 2014 at 11:37 am
In the US and in Canada, family doctors receive a mini-credit for reflecting on clinical information they retrieved in a search. Reflection is promoted by completing a questionnaire about what was read.
Our research group has examined the outcomes of searches that addressed clinical questions for specific patients. Please see http://www.annfammed.org/content/11/6/559.full
In this paper, doctors reported the most common benefit of searching a knowledge resource was ‘avoiding an unnecessary diagnostic test, treatment or specialist referral’. So it appears that searching to answer clinical questions is one way to reduce overdiagnosis and overtreatment in primary health care.
If credits can encourage searching for answers to clinical questions, then it becomes important to develop the capacity for TRIP users to document credits for reflecting on what they read.
Disclosure: I co-developed the Information Assessment Method (the IAM), which contains a brief validated questionnaire. The IAM is a tool designed to stimulate reflective learning. The IAM questionnaire is protected by copyright but freely available for you to use. Please see http://www.mcgill.ca/iam
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