[Evaluation of continuing medical education (CME) in print media]

In order to achieve points for the CME certificate of the German Medical Council ("Arztekammer") the reader of a CME article in a medical journal has to fill in an evaluation form that includes knowledge assessment. This article summarizes the data of the first ten CME presentations in the "Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift".

4481 completed data sets were evaluated by chi-square and binomial tests using SPSS version 10.0.

85% of the participants were specialists, mainly in internal medicine or surgery: those working in private practice or a hospital took part. The great majority had received their licence one to 30 years ago. The topics dealt with diseases which were not uniformly often seen in clinical practice. The individually perceived changes in the strategy of diagnosis and therapy, induced by the CME article, was mainly dependent on qualification and specialization of the reader as well as on the frequency, with which the reader had been treating the respective disorder. The articles were appreciated by specialists as well as by non-specialists. Knowledge assessment was largely made on the basis of the article alone and was successfully passed by nearly 90% of the participants.

For the first time this article provides detailed data on CME activities in a nation-wide available German medical journal and thus forms the basis for discussing further the definition of quality criteria for CME articles in medical journals.