The Benefit of Structured Triage of Patients in the Primary Health Care Seeking Care for Low Back Pain

FoU Center Spenshult

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Low Back Pain

Treatments: Other: Back pain screening test

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03368521

Low back pain_RCT_2017

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study aims to investigate if a low back pain screening tool is helpful for the caregivers to direct the rehabilitation in a more efficient way, at an earlier stage. Primary Health care centers in the municipality of Halmstad, Sweden will be enrolled to participate in the study as either "Control" or "intervention". The primary Health care centers who are enrolled taking part in the intervention, will use the provided screening tool when taking care of patients seeking care for low back pain. Scorings from the screening tool will "label" the patients as one of Three pre-defined risk levels. The caregiver will then use the provided risk level when deciding how to proceed the rehabilitation. Based on the risk level identified, the patient is directed to one of three levels of treatments - including simple advice; physiotherapy; or multimodal rehabilitation. The screening tool is used as a complement to the examination, allowing the physiotherapist /GP to decide how to proceed with rehabilitation using the back screening tool, together with Clinical examinations. The Control Group consists of patients recruited when seeking care for back pain at a Primary Health Care service who has been randomly selected as "Control". The care givers at the Control primary Health care will conduct as usual, not using the back pain screening tool in their Clinical examinations.

Enrollment: 150 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 67 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Seeking care for low back pain at any of the included primary Health care.

Exclusion criteria

• Red flags

Trial design

Primary purpose: Screening

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

---

150 participants in 2 patient groups

Back pain screening group

Other group

Description:

Includes the Group of patients where the care giver has used the back pain screening tests studied in order to judge how to proceed with rehabilitation, which level of rehabilitation is appropriate.

Treatment:

Other: Back pain screening test

treatment as usual

No Intervention group

Description:

The Group get treatment as usual, where the care giver base the rehabilitation plan without taking the scorings from the screening tool into consideration.