What is the Effect of a Course for Treatment Providers on Their Patient Outcome
Condition: Pain
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      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.
    

Detailed 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.
    

Intervention name(s): an eight day university training course designed to integrating psychosocial factors in clinical practice on a patient level
Intervention type(s): Behavioral
Intervention description(s): an eight day university training course on psychosocial factors for physical therapists
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Crossover Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Treatment
Keywords: Physical therapy,; musculoskeletal pain,; psychosocial factors,; dissimilation,; evidence based,; education