General practice trainees' information searching strategies for clinical queries encountered in daily practice

Earlier studies have shown that clinical queries are common among doctors. Data on the information-seeking behaviour of general practice (GP) trainees are scarce though, and numbers studied are small.

The objective of this study was to determine how often and how GP trainees search for answers to clinical queries encountered in daily clinical practice.

Third-year GP trainees kept logs on all patient contacts for eight consecutive practice days. Information was obtained on patient contacts (description), clinical queries (frequency, type), seeking behaviour (frequency, moment, reason not to search, resources used, duration of search) and answers (frequency, impact). Descriptive analyses were performed; frequencies and percentages were computed. We calculated the number of clinical queries per patient, the number of searches per query and the number of answers per search.

Seventy-six trainees reported 1533 clinical queries about 7300 patients presenting 7619 complaints [mean of 0.2 queries per patient, standard deviation (SD) 0.1]. For most of the queries trainees pursued an answer (mean of 0.8 per query, SD 0.2), mostly during consultation (61% of searches), and frequently retrieved answers (mean of 0.8 per search, SD 0.17) they reported to improve clinical decision making in 26%. Most common resources were colleagues or supervisors (28%), and national GP guidelines (26%). The median duration of a search was 4 minutes (interquartile range 3).

GP trainees have one clinical query per five patients. They often attempted to find answers and reported to succeed in most of the searches, primarily by consulting supervisors or colleagues and national GP guidelines.