Measuring clinician knowledge, understanding and attitudes to overdiagnosis are key to understanding the drivers of overdiagnosis, developing strategies to reduce overdiagnosis, and assessing the effectiveness of interventions aiming to prevent overdiagnosis. As the responsibility of ordering screening and diagnostic tests falls to clinicians, changing clinician attitudes to overdiagnosis and clinicians’ test-ordering practices has great potential to reduce overdiagnosis. The development of a scale to measure clinician knowledge, understanding, attitudes and practices around overdiagnosis would be valuable as a means of measuring the impact of clinician-targeted interventions. To date, scales to measure knowledge and attitudes about overdiagnosis have only been developed for patients and the general public, with no scale available for clinicians.

In this workshop we will present the results of a narrative review of studies on clinician knowledge, understanding, and attitudes to overdiagnosis, and how these relate to test ordering practice. Workshop participants will be asked to discuss the relevance of identified themes from the narrative review for their own clinical and/or research area, and to raise any other relevant issues that have not been captured by the review. The workshop discussions will be audiotaped verbatim and transcribed for later qualitative analysis. Both the findings from the narrative review and the qualitative analysis of the workshop discussions will inform development of a scale to measure clinician knowledge, understanding, and attitudes to overdiagnosis and test-ordering practices.

Objectives

1. To present the findings of a narrative review of studies on clinician knowledge, understanding and attitudes to overdiagnosis;

2. To facilitate discussion on the topic informed by the narrative review with the aim of compiling a list of key themes and items to be incorporated into a measurement scale.

Learning outcomes As the aim of the workshop is to discuss the findings of the narrative review and to compile a list of key themes in partnership with workshop participants there are not specific learning outcomes. However, by the end of the workshop participants will have a good understanding of the key issues related to clinicians’ knowledge, understanding and attitudes to overdiagnosis and how these impact test ordering practice.