ArticleThe Journal of manual & manipulative therapy2015
Knowledge translation from continuing education to physiotherapy practice in classifying patients with low back pain.
Article in The Journal of manual & manipulative therapy, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The educational pathway to Advanced Practice for the physiotherapist: A systematic mixed studies review.PloS one · 2025Pooled it
- Clinical reasoning skills of German and Dutch manual therapists: a cross-sectional study.The Journal of manual & manipulative therapy · 2024Article
- Enrollment, adherence and retention rates among musculoskeletal disorders rehabilitation practitioners in knowledge translation studies: a systematic review and meta-regression.Implementation science communications · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesPhysical therapists have used continuing education as a method of improving their skills in conducting clinical examination of patients with low back pain (LBP). The purpose of this study was to evaluate how well the pathoanatomical classification of patients in acute or subacute LBP can be learned and applied through a continuing education format. The patients were seen in a direct access setting.
methodsThe study was carried out in a large health-care center in Finland. The analysis included a total of 57 patient evaluations generated by six physical therapists on patients with LBP. We analyzed the consistency and level of agreement of the six physiotherapists' (PTs) diagnostic decisions, who participated in a 5-day, intensive continuing education session and also compared those with the diagnostic opinions of two expert physical therapists, who were blind to the original diagnostic decisions. Evaluation of the physical therapists' clinical examination of the patients was conducted by the two experts, in order to determine the accuracy and percentage agreement of the pathoanatomical diagnoses.
resultsThe percentage of agreement between the experts and PTs was 72-77%. The overall inter-examiner reliability (kappa coefficient) for the subgroup classification between the six PTs and two experts was 0.63 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.47-0.77], indicating good agreement between the PTs and the two experts. The overall inter-examiner reliability between the two experts was 0.63 (0.49-0.77) indicating good level of agreement. DISCUSSION: Our results indicate that PTs' were able to apply their continuing education training to clinical reasoning and make consistently accurate pathoanatomic based diagnostic decisions for patients with LBP. This would suggest that continuing education short-courses provide a reasonable format for knowledge translation (KT) by which physical therapists can learn and apply new information related to the examination and differential diagnosis of patients in acute or subacute LBP.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.