Table 1

Interventions to promote behavioural change in health professionals*

Consistently effective strategiesStrategies with mixed effectsStrategies having little or no effect
*Adapted from Bero L, Grilli R, Grimshaw JM, et al.14 Reproduced with permission.
Education outreach visits (for prescribing) Audit and feedback Educational materials
Use of a trained person who meets with professionals in their practice settings to provide information with the intent of improving practice.Any written or verbal summary of clinical performance of health care professional over a specified period of time. The summary may also include recommendation for clinical action.Distribution of published or printed recommendations for clinical care, including clinical practice guidelines, audiovisual materials, and electronic publications.
Reminders Local opinion leaders Didactic educational meetings
Any intervention, manual or computerised, that prompts professionals to perform a clinical action.Use of providers nominated by their colleagues as “educationally influential”.Lectures.
Multifaceted interventions Local consensus process
A combination that includes two or more of: audit and feedback, reminders, local consensus processes, patient mediated interventions.Inclusion of participating professionals in discussion to ensure that they agreed that the chosen clinical problem was important and the approach to managing the problem was appropriate.
Interactive educational meetings Patient mediated interventions
Participation of professionals in workshops that include discussion.Any intervention aimed at changing the performance of professionals where specific information was sought from, or given to, patients.