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Enhancing the effectiveness of meetings and workshops through research.

At this writing, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) reports that ACCME-accredited sponsors provided 42,251 workshops and conferences during 1999. These workshops and conferences amounted to 548,032 hours, or approximately 90% of all category 1 continuing medical education (CME) hours provided in the United States to 3,455,882 physician attendees.1 The reliability of ACCME and other data describing the number of CME workshops and conferences can easily be questioned. The ACCME collects annual reports from sponsors focused on American organizations and U.S. physicians. The reports lend themselves to loose interpretation by sponsors and limited quality review by data analysts. Although the Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education develops a biennial survey of CME in North America,2 respondents are restricted to medical schools, and the results have infrequently been peer reviewed or published. Despite the limitations of the data, all of the surveys and probably most practitioners would agree that educational meetings and workshops are the most common format for the continuing education of physicians. For that reason, Thomson O’Brien et al. sought the highest level of evidence for determining the effectiveness of those activities. The group used Cochrane’s Effective Practice and Organization of Care Group specialized register, MEDLINE (from 1996), and the Research and Development Resource Base in CME to search for randomized controlled or quasi-experimental studies that measured the effectiveness of various workshops and meetings. The group’s method of review included rating the quality of each study based on three criteria: study design (randomized controlled trial or nonequivalent group design), blinded outcome assessment, and completeness of follow-up. Analysis included calculation of absolute or relative postintervention differences. The question posed was: Are educational meetings and workshops effective in improving professionals’ practice or health care outcomes? The review group looked for the following comparisons: