Early in 2010, the Practitioner Committee of the EBVMA conducted a survey of practicing veterinarians in the United States concerning their familiarity with the terms and concepts of evidence-based medicine and their attitudes towards it. The survey instrument was based on those used in published studies involving medical doctors and nurses. There were significant challenges in obtaining an adequately large, representative sample of U.S. practitioners. Ultimately, 5000 veterinarians were invited to participate via a printed letter, and 119 completed web-based questionnaires were completed, a response rate of about 2.5%. While this does not permit meaningful generalizations to be made about the population of interest, the project was, at the least, an instructive pilot study, and further studies are planned.
The only way to preserve the figures and formatting of the results summary was to attach it as a .pdf to this post, which can be viewed using the link below.
Survey of Veterinarians’ Knowledge and Attitudes Concerning Evidence-Based Medicine
Was to study modeled from a human medicine study? It would be interesting to compare physicians and human dentist taking the same survey.
Art Malernee dvm
Art,
I modeled it on a couple of surveys of MDs and nurses, especially McColl and the BARRIERS survey.
McColl, A. et al. General practitioners’ perceptions of the route to
evidence based medicine: a questionnaire survey. BMJ 1998;316:361-367.
Ulvenes, LV. et al. Norwegian physicians’ knowledge of and opinions about
evidence-based medicine: Cros-sectional study. PLoS One 2009;4(11):e7828.
Knops, AM. Attitudes, awareness, and barriers regarding evidence-based
surgery among surgeons and surgical nurses. World J Surg 2009:33;1348-1355.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/0m362832215g3x30/fulltext.pdf
BARRIERS utilization scale
Seems like the response rate was low for vets vs the human side but may have been the way questionnaire was sent.
Art Malernee dvm
There were a number of problems with the sample that contributed to the low response rate. Politics prevented me from using a truly representative sample population, so the sample came from a commercial mailing list, which was skewed towards practices listed in business and phone directories. Finances reduced the number of invitations sent and prevented the use of both paper and electronic questionairres and, most importantly, any follow-up mailing.