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"What do you expect from physiotherapy?": a detailed analysis of goal setting in physiotherapy

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-23, 12:51 authored by Veronika Schoeb, Liliana Staffoni, Ruth ParryRuth Parry, Alison Pilnick
Purpose: Health care practice guidelines require physiotherapists to include patients in goal-setting. However, not much is known about how this process is accomplished in practice. The purpose of this study is to analyse patient–physiotherapist consultations and to identify how physiotherapists enquire about goals and how patients respond to these enquiries. Method: 37 consenting patients and their physiotherapist from outpatient physiotherapy practice settings were videotaped. Conversation analysis was used to transcribe and analyse the data. Results: In 11 cases, physiotherapists enquire explicitly about goals. Patients’ responses indicate that problems can arise when therapists’ questions treat it as expected that the patient has a goal already in mind, and has sufficient understanding about “physiotherapy-relevant” goals. Patients’ difficulties with stating a goal are related to patients’ knowledge to propose a goal and whether they treat consultations as one in which it is appropriate to claim knowledge about goals. Conclusions: Goal-setting is not a straightforward process. Practices that entail asking patients to state their goals neither take into consideration the fact that patients may not know what an achievable goal is nor do they consider so-called social reasons for patients not to make claims to their physiotherapist about what the goals should be.

Funding

This study was supported by the Do-RE funds from the Swiss National Science Foundation (No. 13DPD6_124565) and funds from ReSaR of the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland, HES-SO.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Disability and Rehabilitation

Volume

36

Issue

20

Pages

1679 - 1686

Citation

SCHOEB, V. ... et al, 2013. "What do you expect from physiotherapy?": a detailed analysis of goal setting in physiotherapy. Disability and Rehabilitation, 36 (20), pp.1679-1686.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2013

Notes

This paper is closed access.

ISSN

0963-8288

eISSN

1464-5165

Language

  • en