[Assessment of an educational course on asthma for primary care physicians].

Background: The Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) is a collaborative effort to disseminate updated guidelines about the diagnosis and management of patients that suffer from asthma. Implementation of these guidelines by the primary care practitioners reduces the morbidity of these patients.

Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of a training course of asthma on the knowledge of the primary care physicians.

Patients And Methods: Sixty physicians were evaluated before and after a lecture-based educational intervention on asthma. The overall score and per-topic subscores were compared. Likewise, differences among physicians from distinct specialties were assessed. The correlation between perceived and actual usefulness was calculated.

Results: The mean score before the training course was of 65.76 (SD = 11.95) points, and after the course of 84.87 (SD = 9.27) points; p < 0.0001. The mean improvement percentage was of 34.48% for the overall score, 41.47% for general knowledge, 47.57% for diagnosis and 28.4% for treatment. Improvement had no relation with physician's specialty. The correlation between perceived and actual usefulness was of -0.005 (p > 0.05) for the absolute score change and 0.025 (p>0.05) for the percentage change.

Conclusions: A short lecture-based training course of asthma increases the knowledge of bronchial asthma and GINA guidelines among primary health care physicians. Differences among physicians of distinct specialties were not significant.