Evaluation of postgraduate medical education given by the Swedish PTD Committee

The Swedish Committee for the Prevention and Treatment of Depression (the Swedish PTD committee) has created a series of educational programmes to be used in post-graduate education of general practitioners; they deal with the etiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis and treatment of depression. The separate chapters were presented to general practitioners on the island of Gotland in two separate educational programmes with one year in between. Before, in between and after the last educational programme, information was collected regarding number of suicides, number of attempted suicides, number of referrals to the Dept. of Psychiatry, number of emergency admissions, number of subjects on sickleave due to depression and number of prescriptions for antidepressants and minor tranquillizers. The general practitioners completed a questionnaire concerning knowledge about etiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis and treatment of depression, attitudes towards depressed patients and their treatment, current practice and personal experience.After each educational programme an evaluation was made of the participants opinions about the education received. Overall, the results indicate that the general practitioners appreciated the programmes, found them to be on a reasonable level and of good technical quality.There are also results indicating that they in fact treated more depressed patients in a more adequate way after completing the education programmes.