1. Background Results Objective Methods Results Conclusions
Online eLearning for post-registration healthcare professionals
- A bibliographic analysis of the literature.
Pradeep Paul George,1 Elicia Toon Yuan Ni,2 Arash Hadadgar,4 Nakul Saxena,1 Kenneth Lim Teck Kiat,1 Bee Hoon Heng,1Josip Car,2 Craig Lockwood.3
1Health Services & Outcomes Research, National Healthcare Group, 2Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, 3School of Translational Health Science, University of Adelaide, 4Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet.
Background
Results
Learning is intended to be an integral part of how all healthcare professionals (HCPs) provide the most up-to-date care to their patients.
Online eLearning such as continuing medical education (CME) and continuing professional development (CPD) has been used widely as a mode to train healthcare workforce and to enhance patient care.
In the last decade there has been a proliferation of randomized controlled trials on online eLearning for post-registration healthcare professionals, however the impact of a published literature on the field remains unknown.
Citations are increasingly regarded as a measure of scientific quality or impact.
Table:1 Top 10 papers in online eLearning for post-registration HCP training
Year of publication
Manuscript title
Journals
Total number of citations
AWCR
2005
Comparison of the instructional efficacy of Internet-based CME with live interactive CME workshops: a randomized controlled trial
Medical Education
339
30.82
2008
Effectiveness of multifaceted educational programme to reduce antibiotic dispensing in primary care: practice based randomised controlled trial
Occupational medicine (Oxford, England) 81 27
2014
Effects of internet-based training on antibiotic prescribing rates for acute respiratory-tract infections: a multinational, cluster, randomised, factorial, controlled trial
Journal of continuing education in nursing 53
26.5
2012
Training practitioners to deliver opportunistic multiple behaviour change counselling in primary care: a cluster randomised trial
Clinical orthopaedics and related research 43
21.5
2010
Training family physicians in shared decision-making to reduce the overuse of antibiotics in acute respiratory infections: a cluster randomized trial
European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing 39 13
2006
A randomized trial of teaching clinical skills using virtual and live standardized patients
Journal of general internal medicine
119
11.9
Effectiveness of e-learning in continuing medical education for occupational physicians
Family medicine 86
10.75
2009
Which training method works best? A randomized controlled trial comparing three methods of training clinicians in dialectical behavior therapy skills
Behaviour research and therapy 74
10.57
Pressure ulcers: e-learning to improve classification by nurses and nursing students
Journal of clinical nursing 79
9.88
Online spaced education generates transfer and improves long-term retention of diagnostic skills: a randomized controlled trial
Journal of the American College of Surgeons 49
9.8
Objective
This study is a bibliographic analysis of literature on this topic, it examines the citations of online eLearning literature, and evaluates the knowledge structure of this area of research to date.
Methods
The following databases Medline(Ovid), Embase (Elsevier), Cochrane (Wiley), Psychinfo (Ovid), ERIC (Ovid), CINAHL (Ebsco) and Web of Science Core Collection (Thomson Reuters) were searched for studies on online eLearning for post-registration professionals from 1990 to April Only randomized controlled trials (RCT) or cluster RCTs were included.
Results
2,668 articles were included for full text screening of which 251 fulfilled our inclusion criteria. These articles were published in 172 journals, of which 43 journals published 2 or more articles.
The number of articles has increased by 300% from , 56% of these articles were published in the last 5 years, (Table 1) majority of these studies were conducted among doctors (52%) and nurses (26%).
Table: 2 Top 10 journals in online eLearning for post-registration HCP training
Journal
Citations
Rank
# of articles published
Average citations / year
Impact Factor*
Medical Education
372 1 3
10.73
3.12
The Journal of school nursing
148 2
3.67
0.72
Journal of general internal medicine
145
5.34
3.45
Family medicine
134 4
4.50
0.85
American journal of preventive medicine
103 5
3.28
4.53
Behaviour research and therapy 98 6
7.69
3.40
Journal of Pelvic Medicine and Surgery 93 7
5.88
Annals of Surgery 90 8
3.46
8.34
Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 83 9
1.87
3.06
Trials 82 10
7.45
1.73
Figure:1
* as of Sep 3, 2015
Conclusions
There is a substantial body of evidence on use of online e-learning for training post-registration professionals, specifically doctors.
251 articles had 4192 citations, 24 citations per article, top 10 articles had 22% of the total citations.
The most frequently cited paper was by T. Balslev, et al (2005), with 339 citations, it compares instructional efficacy of Internet-based CME with live interactive CME workshops
Top 5 journals with highest citation, number of articles published per year were Medical education, The journal of school of nursing, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Family medicine and American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Figure 1 shows the average age-weighted citation rate for articles on eLearning for post-registration health professionals. AWCR measures the number of citations to an entire body of work, adjusted for the age of each individual paper.