Keeping Your Personal Knowledge Up-To-Date

Your most useful information source is your personal medical knowledge and experience. But is your knowledge of a topic up-to-date? A quick way to test your knowledge is by asking two basic questions: 1. When and where did I learn this information? 2. Does this evidence still represent the current consensus on the topic?

Key Questions

• How well do you know the core knowledge in your specialty?
• How do you manage gaps in your core knowledge?
• How do you test your knowledge to see if it is up-to-date?

The Five Minute Knowledge Test
You can use the principles of evidence-based medicine to quickly test your own knowledge. Take five minutes to ask yourself these questions:

• Why do I treat that particular condition in that particular way?
• Am I aware of any alternative treatments?
• When and where did I learn that information?
• What was the original supporting evidence?
• What evidence do I have that the information is still correct?
• Is it time to review this topic?

Core Knowledge

Knowledge and experience are a physician's most valuable tools. Core knowledge is the information needed to deal effectively with the usual problems that arise in your particular practice.

Exercise
List the 100 most common conditions treated by your specialty, and when you last treated each of those conditions. One way to create the list is to review the table of contents of a textbook in your specialty.

Knowledge Gaps

It is common to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by your current knowledge or experience – some of these can be approached by applying general principles, others can be solved by acquiring new information from textbooks, journals or professional colleagues. Yet others require referral to an expert who has the experience to deal with the problem.

Exercise
Write down the steps you would take to solve a problem when you have insufficient knowledge.

Knowledge Weakness

Knowledge gaps are quite easy to identify. It is much more difficult to determine if your knowledge of a particular topic is up-to-date. Unfortunately, one of the most common reactions is to deny the possibility that such a weakness might exist.

Exercise
The next time you are faced with a problem, use the Five Minute Knowledge test.

External Knowledge Challenges

The most common challenges to our knowledge arise during patient visits. Patients expect physicians to be able to answer their questions. They also have access to many other different sources of medical information, and will often compare what you say with these other sources.

Exercise
Write down how you would approach these common knowledge challenges:

• The patient who has found medical information on the Internet.
• The patient who thinks they have the disease mentioned on television last night.
• The pharmaceutical representative who presents a new product.

Internal Knowledge Challenges

Do you learn new information by just responding to external challenges, or do you also have a plan for regularly reviewing the core knowledge in your specialty.

Exercise
Review one of topics in your list of core topics each week.  By the end of the year you will have reviewed 50 important topics.