THE IMPACT OF AN INDIVIDUAL TUTORIAL SESSION ON MEDLINE USE AMONG OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY RESIDENTS IN AN ACADEMIC TRAINING-PROGRAM - A RANDOMIZED TRIAL

Over the past decade, on-line databases have become increasingly popul ar among health care professionals. As a group, these 'end-users' repo rt utilizing databases to keep abreast of medical progress, to conduct research and to address specific patient care issues. Throughout the literature, medical professionals ('content experts') have proved to b e less effective searchers than librarians ('search experts'). The pot ential implications of this discrepancy are worrysome. For any given c linical scenario, for example, published reports may reach contradicto ry conclusions. A poorly skilled searcher may not retrieve enough arti cles to appreciate this fact. Optimizing searching skills is therefore a worthwhile goal. As a first step, many medical schools introduce st udents to on-line databases, most notably MEDLINE. Residency is an ide al time to continue this training. A recognized obstacle to providing residents with formal MEDLINE instruction is time constraint. We there fore conducted this study to ascertain the impact an individual 1-hour tutorial session would have on MEDLINE utilization among obstetrics a nd gynecology residents training at an academic medical centre. Outcom e measures included MEDLINE search frequency, duration, recall, precis ion and searcher satisfaction. Search recall measures the searcher's a bility to retrieve articles deemed relevant to the question at hand. S earch precision gauges the searchers' ability to eliminate irrelevant articles. Although the sessions were well received, we were unable to demonstrate an improvement in the outcome measures analysed. Further r esearch is therefore indicated so that cost-effective educational stra tegies can be recommended for wide-scale use.