A conceptual framework for increasing clinical staff member involvement in general practice: a proposed strategy to improve the management of low back pain

Abstract

Background: Low back pain affects about 80% of all adults, many of whom consult general practice. Providing management can be challenging, in part due to the scarcity of effective treatment methods. There is broad consensus in international clinical practice guidelines to provide patients with information about the nature of their pain and recommend them to stay active despite discomfort. Delivering this information is time-demanding and challenged by the limited available resources in general practice in many countries. Furthermore, general practice settings are highly variable in size and in their composition of clinical staff members - which presents difficulties, but also opportunities for developing alternative approaches to clinical management. Expanding the patient consultation time by involving clinical staff members (aside from the general practitioner) has been found feasible for other conditions. We propose that this approach is applied for non-specific low back pain. Consequently, we suggest the involvement of clinical staff members as part of a new strategy for managing low back pain in general practice.

Main text: Multifaceted implementation strategies have the potential to effectively enable change in the clinical management of patients with low back pain in general practice if they are based on theory and are tailored to stake holders. Inspired by the Medical Research Council's guidance for complex interventions and the ChiPP (Change in professional performance) statement, we suggest applying the following two policy categories: organizational change (environmental/social planning) and service provision. This will involve attention to environmental restructuring, modelling, enabling, education, training, persuasion, and incentivising of general practices, with an over-arching strategy of involving clinical staff members in the management of low back pain.

Conclusion: This is a pre-clinical proposal of a multifaceted strategy to support the delivery of evidence-based treatment for patients with low back pain in general practice. As an original idea, we suggest it would be feasible to involve clinical staff members in the delivery of information and advice to patients, whilst the general practitioner remains responsible for diagnostic decision-making.

Keywords: General practice; Implementation; Low back pain; Organizational change.

Fig. 1

General practitioner’s management options for low back pain. Legend: General practitioners (GPs) management options for patients with low back pain. Involving clinical staff members is added to the existing treatment options in this model for general practice. In Denmark, GPs are gate keepers to other health care service in primary or secondary care (illustrated with solid lines). If the management option is not suitable or a change in symptoms is occurring other health care providers can refer back to the GP (illustrated with dotted lines)