Evaluation of an educational intervention to increase health promotion by residents

Preventive health practices known to benefit the general public include aerobic exercise, seat belt use, and self-examination for breast or testicular cancer. Unfortunately, none of these practices is universally promoted by physicians, nor are they widely practiced by patients. To assess whether residents who received a packet of printed material on these four health-related practices and had a 5- to 15-minute review of the material with a physician and an educator would increase their promotion of these healthful behaviors, a controlled trial was conducted at the University of Missouri--Columbia Hospitals and Clinics. When baseline differences in the behavior between the intervention and control groups of residents were controlled statistically, there was no significant difference in the amount of health promotion done by the two groups after the educational intervention. An educational intervention may not be an effective way to increase residents' promotion of healthful activities. These results raise questions about the methods used in some previously published studies that suggested favorable effects of education on physicians' behavior.