Grant: Master's Award: Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

According to the Heart and Stoke Foundation, 70,000 Canadians suffer heart attacks yearly; thanks to drug therapies, approximately 90% survive. However, these individuals have increased risk of future, potentially fatal, cardiovascular events. Three prescription medications have been shown to cost-effectively reduce this risk and prolong life: ACE-inhibitors, Beta-blockers, Statins. Unfortunately, these drugs remain under-prescribed. Audit and feedback of physician practices using Ontario Ministry of Health data has been proposed as way to increase these life-saving prescriptions, since similar projects have been successful in other clinical realms. However, the optimal format of feedback and physicians¿ attitudes toward this type of intervention remains unknown. Individual, semi-structured interviews will be completed to examine the attitudes of Ontario family physicians toward audit and feedback for cardiovascular prescriptions. The participants will be selected to represent a broad range of opinions. Discussions will be anonymously transcribed and analyzed for common themes. The interviews will identify how to develop actionable feedback to improve care provided by Ontario family physicians for patients with a previous heart attack. The lessons learned may then be extrapolated to other clinical areas.