Public health physicians who contribute to on-call communicable disease control duties: national comparative clinical audit by questionnaire survey

Background In most health authorities in the UK, general public health phys icians provide out-of-hours cover for specialists in communicable disease c ontrol. Although communicable disease control was part of their specialist training, there is no current formal mechanism to enable these doctors to k eep up to date. The Faculty of Public Health Medicine has an active Continu ing Professional Development Programme. A new initiative aimed to assess th e knowledge of general public health physicians who take part in on-call co mmunicable disease control rotas, or may do so in the future, by means of a n educational clinical audit exercise. Methods Experts in communicable disease control developed a questionnaire c ontaining a selection of scenarios, covering six different situations that might arise on-call. This was circulated to all members of the Faculty, but participation was voluntary. Answers were marked against model answers agr eed by the experts. Results were analysed by positions held by participants . Results Response was unacceptably low. Overall scores ranged from 15 per ce nt to 89 per cent with a mean of 63 per cent. There was a trend of improvem ent in marks from those not normally involved in on-call (mean score 56.1 p er cent (95 per cent confidence interval 51.6-60.7 per cent)) through Direc tors of Public Health (58.4 (54.9-62.0) per cent), Consultants (62.8 (60-65 .6) per cent), and specialist registrars (67.9 (65.2-70.6) per cent), to Co nsultants in Communicable Disease Control (70.9 (68.1-73.6) per cent). Conclusion The public health physicians who took part in this audit appear to be competent in their knowledge of communicable disease control, and par ticularly good at dealing with meningitis and salmonella, which are frequen tly encountered out of hours.