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General practice / Family practice
Original research
Effect of a dementia education intervention on the confidence and attitudes of general practitioners in Australia: a pretest post-test study
  1. Ron Mason1,
  2. Kathleen Doherty1,
  3. Claire Eccleston1,
  4. Margaret Winbolt2,
  5. Marita Long1,
  6. Andrew Robinson1
  1. 1Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
  2. 2Australian Centre for Evidence Based Aged Care, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Ron Mason; ron.mason{at}utas.edu.au

Abstract

Objectives This study assessed the impact of a Dementia Education Workshop on the confidence and attitudes of general practitioner (GP) registrars (GPR) and GP supervisors (GPS) in relation to the early diagnosis and management of dementia.

Design Pretest post-test research design.

Setting Continuing medical education in Australia.

Participants 332 GPR and 114 GPS.

Interventions Registrars participated in a 3-hour face-to-face workshop while supervisors participated in a 2-hour-modified version designed to assist with the education and supervision of registrars.

Main outcome measures The General Practitioners Confidence and Attitude Scale for Dementia was used to assess overall confidence, attitude to care and engagement. A t-test for paired samples was used to identify differences from preworkshop (T1) to postworkshop (T2) for each GP group. A t-test for independent samples was undertaken to ascertain differences between each workshop group. A Cohen’s d was calculated to measure the effect size of any difference between T1 and T2 scores.

Results Significant increases in scores were recorded for Confidence in Clinical Abilities, Attitude to Care and Engagement between pretest and post-test periods. GPR exhibited the greatest increase in scores for Confidence in Clinical Abilities and Engagement.

Conclusions Targeted educational interventions can improve attitude, increase confidence and reduce negative attitudes towards engagement of participating GPs.

  • medical education
  • confidence and attitudes
  • dementia diagnosis
  • general practitioners
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-033218

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors Study design: MW and AR. Data collection: RM. Data analysis and interpretation: RM, KD and CE. Drafting the article: RM. Critical revision of the article: all authors. Final approval: all authors.

    • Funding This project was funded by the Australian Government Department of Health through the Victorian and Tasmanian Dementia Training Study Centre (DTSC) until 2016 and then Dementia Training Australia (DTA) from 2016. The study design was developed by the Wicking Dementia Research and 29 Education Centre (WDREC) and submitted to the funder (DTSC and DTA) for approval. Data collection, analysis, interpretation and reporting were undertaken by the WDREC in partnership with Margaret Winbolt from La Trobe University, who was Director of the DTSC and is the Director of DTA. All authors had full access to all the data (including statistical reports and tables) in the study and can take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data availability statement No data are available. The data set is not available as ethics approval does not allow release.