corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10971

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Segovis CM, Mueller PS, Rethlefsen ML, Larusso NF, Litin SC, Tefferi A, Habermann TM.
If you feed them, they will come: A prospective study of the effects of complimentary food on attendance and physician attitudes at medical grand rounds at an academic medical center.
BMC Med Educ 2007 Jul 12; 7:(1):22
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/7/22


Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Evidence suggests that attendance at medical grand rounds at academic medical centers is waning. The present study examined whether attendance at medical grand rounds increased after providing complimentary food to attendees and also assessed attendee attitudes about complimentary food.

METHODS: In this prospective, before-and-after study, attendance at medical grand rounds was monitored from September 25, 2002, to June 2, 2004, using head counts and electronic card readers. With unrestricted industry (eg, pharmaceutical) financial support, complimentary food was provided to medical grand rounds attendees beginning June 4, 2003. Attendance was compared during the pre-complimentary food and complimentary food periods. Attitudes about the complimentary food were assessed with use of a survey administered to attendees at the conclusion of the study period.

RESULTS: The mean (+/- SD) overall attendance by head counts increased 38.4% from 184.1 +/- 90.4 during the pre-complimentary food period to 254.8 +/- 60.5 during the complimentary food period (P <.001). At the end of the study period, 70.1% of the attendee survey respondents indicated that they were more likely to attend grand rounds because of complimentary food, 53.6% indicated that their attendance increased as a result of complimentary food, and 53.1% indicated that their attendance would decrease if complimentary food was no longer provided. Notably, 80.3% indicated that food was not a distraction, and 81.7% disagreed that industry representatives had influence over medical grand rounds because of their financial support for the food.

CONCLUSIONS: Providing free food may be an effective strategy for increasing attendance at medical grand rounds.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909