BACKGROUND: Up-to-date psychiatrists provide better patient care and avoid the potentially negative consequences of outdated scientific knowledge. OBJECTIVES: The aim was to identify how Brazilian psychiatrists update their skills, and to evaluate their knowledge of evidenced-based medicine (EBM) and its use in continuing medical education. METHOD: This was a cross-sectional study conducted at the 24th Brazilian Congress of Psychiatry. Participants (n = 188) answered an anonymous, selfapplied questionnaire with 28 questions on socio-demographic characteristics, sources and frequency of updating, and knowledge of EBM. RESULTS: To update their knowledge, 98.3% of the sample attended Brazilian congresses, 97.9% read Brazilian medical journals, 93.9% used textbooks, 89.9% consulted journals published by pharmaceutical companies, 63.5% accessed the Brazilian guidelines, 63.3% used the Medline database, 56.7% read international journals, and 35% accessed the Cochrane Library. Factors that showed statistically significant association with good knowledge of EBM were having graduated from medical school less than ten years before (p < 0.001) and use of Medline (p < 0.009) and Cochrane Library (p < 0.03) as sources for searching the medical literature. CONCLUSIONS: Brazilian psychiatrists make limited use of the best sources of evidence for continuing medical education, thus producing less benefit for patients in clinical decision-making.
Medical Education; Psychiatry; Epidemiology, Descriptive
