Do Bulgarian General Practitioners use evidence-based medicine in daily practice?

Nevena Ivanova

Keywords: General Practitioners, evidence-based medicine, daily practice

Background:

The aim of evidence-based medicine (EBM) is to focus medical practice on evidence from clinical trials

Research questions:

do Bulgarian General Practitioners use evidence-based medicine in daily practice

Method:

a pilot study of 50 GP practices was conducted. A special questionnaire was developed

Results:

36 of participants were female (72%), 14 (28%) male, divided into 5 age groups 25-34 years (16%), 35-44 (4%), 45-54 ( 8%), 55-64 ( 66%), 65 and older (6%). 98% were individual practices, 76% were located in a city. 42 (84%) GPs have specialty in general medicine. 8 (16%) pointed out fluency in English, only 3 have internationally recognized certificate, all from the group age 25-34years. 8% do not know what EBM is, 36% heard about EBM but do not use it, 34% know about EBM but use it occasionally in daily practice, 22% use it regularly. The main reasons for non-use and rare use were: not being fluent in English (84%), insufficient basic knowledge of EBM (56%), mistrust of clinical trial results (26%), lack of knowledge on interpretation of clinical trial results (82%) or interpretation of meta-analyses ( 92%), do not know where to look for information about EBM (52%), lack of time to read (94%). Clinical practice guidelines (3%), PubMed (1%), scientific meetings with lectures in Bulgarian (96%) were sources being used, whereas Cochrane library and EMBASE were not used

Conclusions:

The majority of GPs were older than 55 years (72%) and more than 2/3 were not fluent in English. Other issues were lack of time to read and knowledge to interpret scientific research results. Тhe main source of information about ЕВМ were lectures in Bulgarian. Based on the findings some recommendations could be made - more young doctors should be attracted and start specializing in general medicine, adaptation of the published guidelines for the needs of general practice

Points for discussion:

#23