The Prescription Peer Academic detailing (Rx-PAD) study (completed)

A cluster-randomized educational intervention to improve GPs' prescription practice.

About the project

The study was employed as a cluster-randomized study targeting 80 general practice (GP) continous medical education (CME) groups (about 500 GPs), which was randomized to recieve one out of two interventions - being controls for the other. An extended control group comprized by specialists in general practice not participating in the study was included based on data from the Norwegian Prescription Database (NorPD).The interventions (safer prescribing practice for elderly patients or more rational use of antibiotics for respiratory tract infections (RTIs)), represented in sum a "clinical theme course" for the participants. A group of 26 prescription peer academic detailers (Rx-PADs) eas trained, and they visited each CME group three times.

Objectives

The primary objective of this study is to promote rational pharmacotherapy in general practice by increasing general practitioners' skills and knowledge. More specificly this will be undertaken in two fields: namely, safer use of drugs for elderly (70+) patients, and more rational use of antibiotics for respitory tract infections.

Secondary outcomes are to: establish and validate a set of quality indicators for drug use in old age, develop feasible routines for using data from the Norwegian Prescription Database for prescribing audit in general practice, to test and evaluate a model for prescription peer academic detailing, as part of general practictioners continous education regarding pharmacotherapeutics, to form the basis for a possible future national structure for industry independent CME regarding drug therapy in general practice.

Sub-projects

Financing

Published May 13, 2011 2:28 PM - Last modified Mar. 27, 2023 2:19 PM

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Participants

Detailed list of participants