[Continuing medical education via questionnaire studies. Three pilot projects for anesthesiology, cardiology and neurology]

The Danish Medical Association and the scientific societies have initiated three studies to evaluate the use of questionnaires for continuous medical education. One study was a questionnaire in anaesthesiology with 30 questions with answers yes/no/no answer, which was sent to 600 specialists in anaesthesiology. One study was in cardiology with a multiple choice questionnaire, sent to 300 general practitioners and 75 specialists in internal medicine outside cardiology. One study concerned the educational value of State-of-the-Art articles about neurology in Ugeskrift for Laeger (Journal of the Danish Medical Association) sent to 500 doctors outside neurology. All questionnaires were sent anonymously, with one general reminder. For the anaesthesiology study 234 questionnaires were returned (40.5%). In the cardiology study 195 questionnaires were returned (52%). For the study on neurology 278 answered (56%). Only about half of the questionnaires were returned for the three studies, and a lot of effort and resources were put into the studies. An extension from these small pilot studies to a general systematic continuous methodology with updated questionnaires in the postgraduate medical education seems troublesome. An optional self-registration for medical education such as The Canadian "Mocomp concept" might be a more realistic suggestion.