JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

We would like to thank you for the opportunity to respond to the issues raised in Dr Saishoji’s letter and to clarify aspects of our study design in relation to these concerns. We would also like to thank Dr Saishoji and his colleagues for their interest in our paper and for taking the time to express their concerns. Our study, a pilot randomized controlled trial, adopted mixed-research methods (quantitative and qualitative) to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of utilizing Facebook to deliver a continuous professional education (CPE) programme to healthcare professionals. We believe that it is important to explore different effects of the intervention on participants’ own provision of care. Therefore, we focused on measuring the knowledge relevant for the practical care of people with dementia rather than a high level of scientific knowledge related to dementia [1]. In addition to the primary outcome (knowledge about dementia – by DKAS), we also evaluated participants’ compliance, participants’ engagement in intervention, participants’ satisfaction, participants’ attitudes toward using Facebook for professional education from quantitative perspective. Although significant difference between intervention group (IG) and control group (CG) was not observed in the primary outcomes, we found that the Facebook intervention did well in offering gains to participants’ knowledge, enhanced their engagement and compliance. For that reason, we tried to elaborate all the outcomes to bring readers a comprehensive picture on the actual application of Facebook for future CPE programmes. We agree that there may be increased risk of type 1 error when applying multiple statistical tests and in some occasions, correction, such as the Bonferroni correction, can be used. However, we understand that adopting this kind of correction is not a must, it depends on the rationale of the study [2]. Our study was exploratory, involving a few post-hoc comparisons which were regarded as hypotheses for further investigation. Thus, we believe that no correction would be needed in our pilot study. We appreciate the comment on how we reported our statistical analysis. We would like to take this opportunity to supplement details of our analysis. In measuring the primary outcomes, an independent sample t test was used to compare the changes in the mean knowledge gain scores between the two groups at the post-intervention assessments. We agree with Dr Saishoji that online education is intriguing and important in the current COVID-19 pandemic. We would be glad to keep communicating with investigators on research in this area.