The case for academic detailing with nurse practitioners.
In the age of increasing time demands on nurse practitioners (NPs) and rapidly evolving changes to the evidence base underpinning clinical practice, there is a clear need to provide clinicians with continuing professional development in an effective and time efficient manner. Academic detailing (also called educational outreach) combines the communication and marketing skills of industry with the intellectual rigor of academe to construct and deliver medical education programs. Trained facilitators visit healthcare practitioners one on one in their place of work to deliver key clinical messages on a defined topic of interest and relevance to the provider. The key messages are often phrased as succinct action statements to help support behavior change. The sessions between facilitator and provider are highly interactive and seek to elicit the specific needs of the individual provider, as well as discussing the key messages of the topic. The overall goal of academic detailing programs is to facilitate good clinical decision making by providing clinicians and patients with evidence based, practical, clinically relevant, and independent/unbiased information that takes a biopsychosocial approach. An extensive review of the biomedical literature and writing of de novo clinical reviews help to elicit the key messages and support each educational topic. An important aspect of successful academic detailing programs is to establish how outcomes from clinical trials should influence real life clinical practice. In particular, this has involved determining the comparative effectiveness of active therapies in relation to clinical outcomes rather than surrogate markers. We have been providing academic detailing programs to physicians in the United States and Australia for more than 15 years, and more recently to NPs, particularly in their role as prescribers. The programs are universally well received, uptake is high, and retention rates approach 100% A number of themes that clinicians value in the programs consistently emerge in their feedback: (a) the independent noncommercial nature of the information provided; (b) the clinical relevance of the key messages framed as action statements; (c) a focus on comparative effectiveness of active therapies, not just therapy versus placebo; (d) a willingness to discuss individual clinical needs; (e) a translation of how clinical trial results should influence clinical practice; and (f) the individualized oneon one visit in their workplace. Rationale for academic detailing
Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners