Pamphlet as a tool for continuing medical education: performance assessment in a randomized controlled interventional study

BACKGROUND Pamphlet is a tool used for distance continuous professional development programs. In this study, we assessed the impact of an educational pamphlet on improving prescription writing errors in general physicians' performance. METHODS In this randomized controlled interventional study, we prepared a training pamphlet according to the most prevalent prescription writing problems. We randomized 200 participants among general physicians affiliated with Tehran Social Security Insurance Organization, and randomly divided them into intervention and control groups. Participants' prescriptions (N= 34888) were investigated over a month, and then the prepared pamphlet was sent out to the participants in the intervention group. After three months we examined their one-month prescriptions again (N= 30296) and investigated the changes in prescription errors. RESULTS There was no significant difference in the mean number of prescriptions in two groups before and after intervention (p= 0.076). Mean number of medicinal items reduced significantly in intervention group. Also mean number of prescriptions including injection drugs (p= 0.024), Corticosteroids (p= 0.036), Cephalosporin (p= 0.017) and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (p=0.005) reduced significantly. No significant differences were found for other errors. CONCLUSION This study showed that use of an appropriate pamphlet has a considerable impact on improving general physicians' performance and could be applied for continuous professional development.