Grant: Knowledge Synthesis Grant

Among health professionals, self-audit means reviewing one's own practice to identify problems and their cause, and understand how to improve the quality of health care services they provide. To maintain medical certification, physicians in Canada, the United Kingdom and United States are required to show annual proof of learning activities, including self-audit. Our research and that of others shows that family physicians and general surgeons spend little time on self-audit, mostly because they do not know how. Practice guidelines are documents that summarize the most current research and provide physicians with recommendations for how to manage patients with different conditions. Simply producing guidelines does not mean they are used, as has been shown by numerous studies. International guideline experts suggest that physicians would more likely use guidelines if they contained, or were accompanied by tools that helped them compare their practice with guideline recommendations. Researchers analyzed many guidelines from different countries and found that most did not contain such information. Creation of self-audit tools could assist a greater number of physicians to more easily review their own practice. This would help them to conduct meaningful learning activities necessary to maintain medical certification, and adopt practice guideline recommendations. By doing so, they are equipped to deliver the best possible care to their patients. So that we can test self-audit tools in future research studies we will search the medical literature and Internet to learn more about the features of self-audit tools used successfully by others, and invite physician educators, medical licensing groups, practice guideline developers, family physicians and general surgeons to a one-day meeting where they will be asked to review the findings and suggest how we should develop a self-audit tool.