Learning effects of a workshop in palliative cancer care for general practitioners

Cancer patients may unnecessarily suffer from pain and other symptoms due to insufficient knowledge on the part of their doctors. In The Netherlands, the general practitioner is considered to be the key provider of palliative care for the cancer patient. Therefore, the authors developed and conducted workshops to teach symptom control to general practitioners. These workshops contained learning objectives from which they selected 18 items to form a questionnaire with five-point response scales. The goal of this study was to investigate changes in the knowledge and attitude scores of the participating general practitioners.

The participants were asked to complete the questionnaire at the start of the workshop and also four months later.

Responses were obtained from 120 general practitioners for the pre-workshop and 96 for the post-workshop questionnaires. The majority of the scores increased toward the desired effect, and some items' scores improved by almost two points.

The results suggest improvements in general practitioners' knowledge and attitude scores with regard to cancer pain and symptom management. Future studies should try to link these improvements with quality-of-life parameters of terminal cancer patients and their families.