With 17,628 subscribers and over 16,000 people accessing it online every week, the WFSA Anaesthesia Tutorial of the Week (ATOTW) has become a mainstay of continued medical education for anaesthesia providers the world over.
To ensure that ATOTW continues to provide quality educational resources WFSA conducted a user survey over 16 months to better understand how, why, where and when people accessed it.
ATOTW was established in 2005 as an open access educational resource to support anaesthesia training globally, especially in areas where access to journal and learning material is limited. To date the online resource has published over 400 articles across ten anaesthesia specialties.
Published on a bi-weekly basis, ATOTW tutorials are peer-reviewed, based on the most current literature and are translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Since 2017, readers can also test their knowledge through CME quizzes.
The ATOTW survey report findings are based on 765 responses, drawn from 98 countries, to an online survey conducted between September 2017 and January 2019.
Topics covered by the report include:
- When, where and how readers access ATOTW
- The relevance of ATOTW to clinical practice
- How readers use ATOTW
- How people access CME/CPD
- Recommendations on how to improve ATOTW
Utilisation of ATOTW
The findings show that ATOTW is highly valued by its readers who access it on a regular basis. It is viewed as a practical, relevant and quality education resource which has wide applications in both clinical and teaching settings.
In addition, 30% of users stated they had found out about the resources through personal references suggesting those who access ATOTW value it as a beneficial learning resource they actively share with others.
What did users like about ATOTW and what could be improved?
When questioned about what they liked the most about ATOTW, the most common responses were the quality of the content, concise and easy to read articles and the ability to test knowledge and gain CME points.
The report outlines that gaining CME points through ATOTW is particularly important to anaesthesia providers in areas where it is difficult to access CME points or where there is no accreditation body.
Users were also asked to evaluate ATOTW and recommend areas for improvement. Further to receiving their feedback, the ATOTW platform is currently in the process of being re-designed to improve issues with accessibility and difficulties using the ATOTW database. A low bandwidth mobile-friendly design will enable users to access the tutorials easily and an improved search function will enable readers to find the subject areas that interest them. Effort is also being made to commission more authors from low resources settings and increase the number of translations.
The results of this survey highlight that our readers value ATOTW as a high-quality, relevant and practical education resource that is accessed by them on regular basis in both clinical and teaching settings. We thank everyone who has contributed to making ATOTW such a valuable resource.
If you have a colleague who doesn’t yet subscribe to ATOTW please invite them – (we now know over a 1/3 of our users found ATOTW through a friend).
