Continuing education meetings and workshops: effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes

Background Educational meetings are used widely by health personnel to provide continuing medical education and to promote implementation of innovations or translate new knowledge to change practice within healthcare systems. Previous reviews have concluded that educational meetings can result in small changes in behaviour, but that effects vary considerably. Investigations into which characteristics of educational meetings might lead to greater impact have yielded varying results, and factors that might explain heterogeneity in effects remain unclear. This is the second update of this Cochrane Review. Objectives • To assess the effects of educational meetings on professional practice and healthcare outcomes • To investigate factors that might explain the heterogeneity of these effects Search methods We searched CENTRAL, MEDLINE, Embase, ERIC, Science Citation Index Expanded (ISI Web of Knowledge), and Social Sciences Citation Index (last search in November 2016). Selection criteria We sought randomised trials examining the effects of educational meetings on professional practice and patient outcomes. Data collection and analysis Two review authors independently extracted data and assessed risk of bias. One review author assessed the certainty of evidence (GRADE) and discussed with a second review author. We included studies in the primary analysis that reported baseline data and that we judged to be at low or unclear risk of bias. For each comparison of dichotomous outcomes, we measured treatment effect as risk difference adjusted for baseline compliance. We expressed adjusted risk difference values as percentages, and we noted that values greater than zero favour educational meetings. For continuous outcomes, we measured treatment effect as per cent change relative to the control group mean post test, adjusted for baseline performance; we expressed values as percentages and noted that values greater than zero favour educational meetings. We report means and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) and, when appropriate, medians and interquartile ranges to facilitate comparisons to previous versions of this review. We analysed professional and patient outcomes separately and analysed 22 variables that were hypothesised a priori to explain heterogeneity. We explored heterogeneity by using univariate meta‐regression and by inspecting violin plots. Main results We included 215 studies involving more than 28,167 health professionals, including 142 new studies for this