Level of Knowledge of Physiotherapy among High School Sports Coaches in Harare , Zimbabwe

The aim of this study was to determine the level of knowledge of physiotherapy among sports coaches in government –administered high schools and determine the factors associated with the level of knowledge in Harare, Zimbabwe. Sports are a fundamental part of human existence across all ages with well documented positive health-related benefits. As such, high school sports form an integral component of the school curriculum in Zimbabwe with adolescents participating in local inter-schools or national competitions under the auspices of school coaches who in most cases are just but school teachers with respective passion for the sport. A recent observation of the inter-scholastic and national sporting events in Harare involving adolescents showed that sports-related injuries are common and the predominant number of these injuries could be avoided or severity reduced if the schools had medical personnel such as physiotherapists incorporated into their teams as resident sports physiotherapists. Physiotherapy has been shown to be important in sports circles with regards to injury prevention, performance enhancement, identification, and immediate management of acute athletic injuries and the long term rehabilitation of injuries in the literature. This prompted an investigation into the level of knowledge of the sports coaches with regards to physiotherapy. A cross-sectional study was conducted targeting sports coaches in the all high schools within the seven educational districts of Harare Province. One school was randomly selected from each educational district and all the sports coaches meeting the inclusion criteria were eligible. One hundred and twenty questionnaires were administered and 102 (85%) were returned completely filled in. The questionnaire used for the study was adopted and slightly modified for the local context from one used in a previous study in South Africa. The questionnaire was evaluated for content validity by experts and tested for reliability in a test re-test preliminary study. The data was analysed descriptively using Statistica version 11 with alpha set for significance at <0.05. The Chi-square test was used to determine the factors associated with the level of knowledge. The median age of the participants was 37 years [Interquartile range= 30-44 years]. Overall, the majority (66.7%) of the sports coaches had adequate knowledge about physiotherapy in terms of the scope of practice, therapeutic benefits, place of work, conditions seen, areas of concern for sports physiotherapists, equipment used and the role of physiotherapists in injury prevention in high school sports. Three-quarters of the sport coaches with adequate knowledge on physiotherapy indicated that their source of information about physiotherapy was mainly the media. The level of knowledge of physiotherapy among the sport coaches was associated with number of years in coaching (p=0.03). Although these results show that sports coaches are knowledge about physiotherapy future studies with large sample sizes using mixed methods are needed to evaluate the uptake of physiotherapy services in high schools.