Knowledge and attitude factors influencing primary care clinicians’
diagnosis, treatment, and management of urinary tract infections in
England: A qualitative ‘think-aloud’ study
Abstract
Objectives: To identify knowledge and attitude factors
influencing primary care clinician decision-making in diagnosing,
managing, and treating urinary tract infections. Design: A
qualitative think-aloud study. Methods: Semi-structured
qualitative interviews were conducted with primary care clinicians in
England over Microsoft Teams. Interviews were transcribed and coded in
two ways. First, clinicians’ responses for each scenario were coded as
either following (optimal) or not following (suboptimal) evidence-based
national guidelines. Second, the knowledge and attitude factors that
influenced decision-making were coded according to an
empirically-informed umbrella framework. Clinicians external to the
study team reviewed the findings to promote their trustworthiness and
utility. Setting: English primary care clinicians with the
right to prescribe medications in England. Sample: Ten clinicians with
prescribing rights in primary care took part. Results: Despite
clinicians’ expressing high awareness of relevant evidence-based
guidelines (a knowledge factor) and high confidence (an attitude
factor), more than half of their decisions were suboptimal in some way.
Our framework analysis suggests that knowledge could impede adherence,
e.g., where local guidelines conflicted with national guidelines.
Conclusions: Suboptimal prescribing decisions could result from
a combination of different knowledge and attitude factors. Most
clinicians relied on their experiential knowledge rather than using
evidence-based guidelines. To optimise antibiotic prescribing,
policy-level interventions could increase concordance across local and
national guidelines, or more tailored individual-level interventions
could help clinicians recognize where their experiential knowledge
causes deviations from evidence-based guidelines when diagnosing,
treating, and managing urinary tract infections.