Résumé
Background and objective: Evidence-based medicine, by guiding medical care towards meaningful outcomes to patients, has a significant worldwide impact on medical care and education. It is important that medical students, whom are the future physicians, keep themselves updated with recent advancement in medical knowledge and health care. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to determine the attitude, knowledge and barriers among students towards evidence-based medicine and making them familiar with the concept and advantage of evidence based medicine
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 163 sixth year students of the College of Medicine at Hawler Medical University during the period from October 2012 to May 2013. The response rate was 86.5%. Knowledge towards evidence-based medicine, accessing and interpreting evidence and perceived barriers to practice evidence-based medicine among participants were the main outcome measures
Results: Of 141 of participants that filled the questionnaire, only 69.5% had heard about evidence-based medicine. Around 82% stated that they had knew evidence-based medicine and only 23.5% had knew steps of evidence-based medicine. Around 65% of respondents welcomed the promotion of evidence-based medicine and 74.4% agreed with that finding from the current study in which it would be helpful in daily management of patients. Furthermore, 31.6% of students reported that standard textbook as a frequent source used for medical knowledge. Around 91% of students did not know the strongest evidence in the hierarchy of evidence and only small proportion of students reported that they understand the common epidemiological concepts that are used in evidence-based medicine
Conclusion: Evidence-based medicine is relatively a new concept among students at the College of Medicine in Erbil. Although the students appeared interested in learning and implementing evidence-based medicine in clinical practice, they need more guidance and training to ensure the correct use of evidence-based medicine ideals
Résumé
This study was conducted to assess how common is the use of antibiotics in the treatment of acute upper respiratory tract infections by primary health care providers in north of Jordan, and the appropriateness of that use. Furthermore, to assess antibiotic use in relation to patients and physician characteristics. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among patients with acute upper respiratory tract infections attending primary health centers in Irbid governorate in north of Jordan. All patients with upper respiratory infections above the levels of the bronchioles were eligible for inclusion in this study. Accordingly, 234 patients were included. Each patient was first seen and treated by the health center general practitioner and re-examined and evaluated independently by a family medicine consultant during the same visit. The mean age of patients was 17.1 years [SD=16.4] and more than half of them [56%] were children < 15 years old. General practitioners prescribed antibiotics to 61% of the patients, and these prescriptions were inappropriate in 86% of the cases. Patients' characteristics such as age, sex and education showed no role on the antibiotic prescribing decision of their physicians. Antibiotic use for upper respiratory tract infections in Jordan is common and largely inappropriate, and the characteristics of patients did not influence antibiotic prescribing by physicians. We recommend further investigations of this important issue, to find out the reasons of overusing antibiotics by physicians in these illnesses