GENERAL-PRACTITIONERS PERCEPTIONS OF THE ROUTE TO EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE - A QUESTIONNAIRE SURVEY

Objectives: To determine the attitude of general practitioners towards evidence based medicine and their related educational needs. Design: A questionnaire study of general practitioners. Setting: General pract ice in the former Wessex region, England. Subjects: Randomly selected sample of 25% of all general practitioners (452), of whom 302 replied. Main outcome measures: Respondents' attitude towards evidence based m edicine, ability to access and interpret evidence, perceived barriers to practising evidence based medicine, and best method of moving from opinion based to evidence based medicine. Results: Respondents mainly welcomed evidence based medicine and agreed that its practice improves patient care. They had a low level of awareness of extracting journal s, review publications, and databases (only 40% knew of the Cochrane D atabase of Systematic Reviews), and, even if a aware, many did not use them. In their surgeries 20% had access to bibliographic databases an d 17% to the world wide web. Most had some understanding of the techni cal terms used. The major perceived barrier to practising evidence bas ed medicine tvas lack of personal time. Respondents thought the most a ppropriate way to move towards evidence based general practice was by using evidence based guidelines or proposals developed by colleagues. Conclusion: Promoting and improving access to summaries of evidence, r ather than teaching all general practitioners literature searching and critical appraisal, would be the more appropriate method of encouragi ng evidence based general practice. General practitioners who are skil led in accessing and interpreting evidence should be encouraged to dev elop local evidence based guidelines and advice.