A CHECKLIST TO ASSESS PATIENT EDUCATION IN PHYSICAL THERAPY PRACTICE - DEVELOPMENT AND RELIABILITY

Patient education in physical therapy is gaining attention because it can contribute to patient compliance and prevention. This article describes the development of an assessment tool for investigating patient education in physical therapy. A checklist of 65 educational activity items was constructed. The investigators tested the applicability of the checklist using 227 audiotaped treatment sessions involving patients from various private practices in the Netherlands. The 227 audiotaped sessions covered the entire period of treatment for 25 patients, each of whom participated in an average of 9 treatment sessions. The results showed that all except 1 of the 65 educational activities occurred in the 227 treatment sessions and that no educational activities occurred that could not be rated in the checklist. These findings may indicate that the checklist covers the entire range of educational activities currently applied by physical therapists. The reliability of the checklist was tested using a subsample of the treatments. The average scores for interrater and intrarater reliability, as determined by the use of the Cramer's V coefficient of association for ordinal data, were .76 and .81, respectively. The checklist can be used to investigate the current educational activities in physical therapy practice. In addition, the checklist can be used in peer review and can contribute to the development of standards for the quality of care.