Epidural Steroid Injections Exercise Therapy Massage Therapy Muscle Relaxants Multidisciplinary Pain Programs Non-steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs ( NSAIDs ) Prolotherapy Injections Spinal Manipulative Therapy Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation ( TENS ) Cannabis or Cannabinoids COX-2 inhib

Background: The purpose of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is to make the best possible summary of the evidence regarding specific health interventions in order to influence health care and policy decisions. The need for decision makers to find relevant HTA data when it is needed is a barrier to its usefulness. These barriers are highest in rural areas and amongst isolated practitioners. Methods: A multidisciplinary team developed an interactive case-based instructional strategy on the topic of chronic non-cancer pain (CNCP) management using clinical evidence derived by HTA. The evidence for each of 18 CNCP interventions was distilled into single-sheet summaries. Clinicians and HTA specialists ('Ambassadors') conducted 11 two-hour interactive sessions on CNCP in eight of Alberta's nine health regions. Preand postsession evaluations were conducted. Results: The sessions were attended by 130 individuals representing 14 health and administrative disciplines. The ambassador model was well received. The use of content experts as ambassadors was highly rated. The educational strategy was judged to be effective. Awareness of the best evidence in CNCP management was increased. Although some participants reported practice changes as a result of the workshops, the program was not designed to measure changes in patient outcome. Conclusion: The ambassador program was successful in increasing awareness of the best evidence in CNCP management, and positively influenced treatment decisions. Its teaching methods were felt to be unique and innovative by participants. Its methods could be applied to other clinical content areas in order to increase the uptake of the results of HTA. Background The need for practitioners to stay abreast of the medical literature is critical, but tools to actively support this goal are few. One response is Health Technology Assessment (HTA), a systematic search, assessment and summary of the extant literature on a specific health intervention or policy, analyzed both for outcome and the quality of the evidence itself. The goal of HTA is to produce credible Published: 31 March 2006 BMC Medical Education2006, 6:21 doi:10.1186/1472-6920-6-21 Received: 20 December 2005 Accepted: 31 March 2006 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/21 © 2006Rashiq et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.