Professional interventions as per Cochrane EPOC review group (adapted from2)
| Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| A | Distribution of educational materials | Distribution of published or printed recommendations for clinical care, including clinical practice guidelines, audiovisual materials and electronic publications. The materials may have been delivered personally or through mass mailings |
| B | Educational meetings | Healthcare providers who have participated in conferences, lectures, workshops or traineeships |
| C | Local consensus processes | Inclusion of participating providers in discussion to ensure that they agreed that the chosen clinical problem was important and the approach to managing the problem was appropriate |
| D | Educational outreach visits | Use of a trained person who met with providers in their practice settings to give information with the intent of changing the provider's practice. The information given may have included feedback on the performance of the provider(s) |
| E | Local opinion leaders | Use of providers nominated by their colleagues as ‘educationally influential’. The investigators must have explicitly stated that their colleagues identified the opinion leaders |
| F | Patient-mediated interventions | New clinical information (not previously available) collected directly from patients and given to the provider, for example, depression scores from an instrument |
| G | Audit and feedback | Any summary of clinical performance of healthcare over a specified period of time. The summary may also have included recommendations for clinical action. The information may have been obtained from medical records, databases or patient observations |
| H | Reminders | The patient or provider encounters specific information designed or intended to prompt a health professional to recall information or perform or avoid some action to aid individual patient care. Computer-aided decision support is included |
| I | Marketing | Use of personal interviewing, group discussion (‘focus groups’) or a survey of targeted providers to identify barriers to change and subsequent design of an intervention that addresses identified barriers |
| J | Mass media | Either (1) varied use of communication that reached great numbers of people including television, radio, newspapers, posters, leaflets and booklets, alone or in conjunction with other interventions, or (2) targeted at the population level |
EPOC, Effective Practice and Organisation of Care.