Skills and topics in continuing medical education for rural doctors.
BACKGROUND
Organizations that fund and produce continuing medical education (CME) activities must have up-to-date information on the needs of their participants. The paper describes a method for assessing priorities for the provision of facilities to rural doctors in Australia for educational topics and skills upgrades. It uses an instrument designed to establish a measure of knowledge and skills that records the difference between the "current felt need" and "desired level of competence."


METHODS
A questionnaire was sent to all identifiable rural doctors throughout Australia, including participants in various types of practice. The resulting dataset is designed for future dissection and comparison of subsets by gender, practice size, rurality, and style of practice (whether procedural). It seeks to deliver a prioritized list of educational topics based on subjective gap analysis with weighting on the degree to which the need is unmet.


RESULTS
There was considerable consonance between the major "felt needs" and other measures of need.


CONCLUSIONS
In spite of statistical deficiencies, which would be corrected in future work, the method offers a new instrument to prioritize the use of resources for CME delivery.
Rural Health Education Foundation, P.O. Box 191, Malanda 4885, Queensland, Australia.
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Hoyal
D001315:Australia; D004502:Education, Medical, Continuing; D006801:Humans; D020380:Needs Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010820:Physicians; D012424:Rural Population; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires