What is the Effect of a Course for Treatment Providers on Their Patient Outcome

Örebro County Council

Status: Completed

Conditions: Pain

Treatments: Behavioral: an eight day university training course designed to integrating psychosocial factors in clinical practice on a patient level

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT00902642

M-127

Details and patient eligibility

About

The goal is to acquire more in-depth knowledge on physical therapists' attitudes towards and beliefs about psychosocial factors in back pain, how physical therapists integrate psychosocial factors into their clinical practice and the effects of a training program for physical therapists in psychosocial factors on clinical practice and thereby on patient outcome in terms of disability, pain, catastrophizing, and treatment satisfaction.

Full description

Neck and back pain continue to be extremely common, with a high prevalence and wide socio-economic consequences all over the industrialized world. Through the years a growing interest has risen for other factors than the pure biomedical or biomechanical. This has led to a new clinical model for the treatment of back pain; the biopsychosocial model of illness. Treatment based on the biopsychosocial model not only must address the biological basis of symptoms, but must incorporate the full range of social and psychological factors that have been shown to affect pain, distress and disability.

Since there is today strong evidence indicating that psychosocial factors have a greater impact on disability then biomechanical or biomedical factors and strong evidence that psychosocial factors are strongly linked to the transition from acute to chronic pain, concept of psychosocial risk factors has been developed. Although the concept of psychosocial risk factors still is relatively new, there seems to be an international consensus about the importance of psychosocial risk factors for the prevention of the development of chronic pain but there appears to be considerable uncertainty about the clinical application.

Health care providers' (HCPs') attitudes and beliefs appear to influence the information they provide to patients. This may subsequently result in different patient outcome depending on the HCPs' attitudes and beliefs. Physical therapists attitudes and beliefs are relatively unexplored but seem to have an effect on patients' attitudes and beliefs, which can affect patient outcome in terms of sick leave, health care use and function.

HCP attitudes and beliefs towards psychosocial factors are relatively unexplored. Yet, it seems physical therapists do not necessarily accept new evidence-based information and may have difficulties in applying evidence-based information in their clinical practice. Implementation and dissemination of evidence-based psychosocial factors requires favourable attitudes, knowledge and skills to ensure a behavioural change on behave of the physical therapists.

Enrollment: 364 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 65 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Musculoskeletal pain,
• Age between 18 and 65

Exclusion criteria

• Sick leave for more than 3 months during the past year as a result of present the musculoskeletal pain problem

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Crossover Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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364 participants in 2 patient groups

control group

No Intervention group

Course on psychosocial factors

Active Comparator group

Description:

an eight day university training course for physical therapists designed to integrating psychosocial factors in clinical practice on a patient level

Treatment:

Behavioral: an eight day university training course designed to integrating psychosocial factors in clinical practice on a patient level