Knowledge and skills toward Evidence-based medicine of General Practitioners in Greece

Konstantina Soultana Kitsou, Konstantina Mavridou, Maria Bakola, Stamatina Aggelakou-Vaitsi, Nikolaos Vaitsis, Maria Drakopoulou, Eleni Jelastopulu

Keywords: Evidence-based medicine, General Practitioners, Clinical Practice

Background:
In order to provide patients with the best care possible, evidence-based medicine (EBM) is used. To support them in their clinical practice, general practitioners (GPs) should critically evaluate the research evidence.

Research questions:
The goal of the research is to evaluate the knowledge and terminology related to EBM among General Practitioners.

Method:
A cross-sectional study using an online survey was developed, and it was distributed via social media platforms. GPs completed a Likert-5 questionnaire, from 1(Poor) to 5(advanced), consisting of several sections to assess skills and knowledge about terms related to EBM. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 25.

Results:
A total of 339 GPs with a mean age of 43.96 ± 7.30 participated in the study. 206 (60.8 %) of them were females. The most used search engines were Google (94.1 %) and Wikipedia (78.2 %). The majority of GPs rated the following skills as average: finding medical literature (3.6/5) and searching online databases (3.5/5) and they reported limited experience in critical appraisal of available scientific literature (1.5/5). The most known terms among GPs were “case study” (100 %), “mean” (96.8 %), “standard deviation” (63.7 %), “prevalence” (61.1 %), and “p-value” (58.4 %), while the least known were “median” (28.9 %), “confidence interval” (18.3 %), “interquartile range (IQR)” (12.1 %), “odds” (9.4 %), and “effect size” (3.2 %).

Conclusions:
GPs seem to have a knowledge gap in skills and terms related to EBM. Most of them were using a nonscientific search engine to obtain medical information. There is a need to educate medical students about the proper steps for getting the scientific literature and EBM skills.

Points for discussion: