Evaluation of a toolkit to improve cardiovascular disease screening and treatment for people with type 2 diabetes: protocol for a cluster-randomized pragmatic trial 0comments
guest IP:173.83.17.* published in 2010-04-26 00:29:02
Background:The gap between the level of concern recommended by evidence-based clinical training guidelines and the actual mind delivered to patients in practice has been well established. The Can ...
Background:The gap between the level of concern recommended by evidence-based clinical training guidelines and the actual mind delivered to patients in practice has been well established. The Canadian Diabetes Association (CDA) created an implementation strategy to improve the implementation of its 2008 guidelines. This study will appraise the impact of the strategy to improve cardiovascular disease (CVD) screening prevention and treatment for people with diabetes.DesignA pragmatic cluster-randomized trial will be conducted to evaluate the CDA's CVD Toolkit. All family physicians in Ontario Canada were randomly allocated to receive the Toolkit which includes several printed educational materials targeting CVD screening prevention and treatment either in spring 2009 (intervention arm) or in spring 2010 (control arm). Randomization occurred at the level of the practice. Forty family physicians from each arm will be recruited to participate and the medical records for 20 of their diabetic patients at high risk for CVD will be retrospectively reviewed. Outcome measures will be assessed for each patient between July 2009 and March 2010. The primary outcome will be that the patient is receiving a statin. Secondary outcomes will include 1) the receipt of an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker 2) various intermediate measures (A1c blood pressure LDL-cholesterol total-/HDL-cholesterol ratio body mass index and waist circumference) and 3) clinical inertia (the failure to change therapy in response to an abnormal A1c blood pressure or cholesterol reading). The analysis will be carried out using multilevel hierarchical logistic regression models to report for the clustered nature of the data. The group assignment will be a physician-level variable. In addition a process evaluation study with six focus groups of family physicians will assess the acceptability of the CDA's Toolkit and will explore factors contributing to any change or shortage of change in behaviour from the perspectives of family physicians.DiscussionPrinted educational materials for physicians have been shown to exert small-to-moderate changes in patient care. The CDA's CVD Toolkit is an sample of a practice guideline implementation strategy that can be disseminated to a wide audience relatively inexpensively and so demonstrating its effectiveness at improving diabetes care could have important consequences for guideline developers policy makers and clinicians.Trial Registration: The trial is registered with http://www.clinicaltrials.gov ID # NCT01026688 Say what I think
