Effective practices in CME for educating busy primary care practitioners in lifestyle change counseling in Chronic Respiratory Diseases

Introduction: The adoption of a healthy lifestyle can greatly benefit patients with chronic respiratory diseases since it enables them to manage their condition more effectively. However, General Practitioners (GPs) often feel ill-equipped to provide effective counseling on lifestyle changes. Time constraints within Continuing Medical Education (CME) programs further hinder GPs from acquiring these skills. To address these challenges, a mixed-methods study was conducted to explore the effectiveness of an experiential online training (EOT) in improving GPs’ skills. Methods: A convergent mixed-methods study was conducted with 49 GPs from Greece. The study incorporated a 25-hour synchronous and asynchronous training intervention. GPs completed a pre-post Training Needs Assessment (TNA) to assess their needs, followed by a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the training/intervention. Additionally, GPs provided written reflections after practicing lifestyle change counseling skills in clinical settings with patients with respiratory diseases. Results: The findings showed a decrease in GPs’ training needs in Communication/Patient-centered Activities after the intervention and at the 3-month follow-up. Participants rated the training/intervention highly, with acceptability ratings ranging from 9.05 to 9.83 on a 10-point scale. Both quantitative and qualitative data indicated that participants improved their ability to self-monitor their practice through reflective writing. The results of the participants' personal reflections converged with the quantitative data, resulted in a need of integration of 3 components: Workplace based learning phase, Active learning phase, Reflective learning phase (figure1). Discussion: This study provides an effective CME framework for improving the knowledge and skill set of GPs as regards respiratory diseases management. While most research on web-based CME focuses on participant satisfaction, this study also shows the potential impact of CME on clinical practice. Policy makers and educators could utilize our findings to design CME programs that could improve the quality-of-care GPs provide to patients with chronic respiratory diseases.