[Comparative study on the influence of health education on perceived recurrences after physiotherapy]

Abstract

Objective: To compare the repercussion on requests for follow-up treatment of the inclusion of health education in the physiotherapist's primary care work.

Setting: Health centre (A). Hospital (B).

Patients and intervention: Patients attending over a six month period two physiotherapy units due to back-ache, cervical pain or a painful shoulder. Group A had 50 patients; and B, 97. The groups were homogeneous by age and gender: A averaged 47 years old (+ 13.4) and was 64% women; B was 45 (+ 12.1) and 69% women. The percentage of pathologies was also homogeneous with a p > 0.1 in back-ache and cervical pain and p > 0.90 for painful shoulders. At centre B (catchment population 73,000) individualised therapy (electrotherapy) was used. At A (catchment 16,000) there was a complete intervention plus health education. A monitoring period for the six following months was set up to observe, for both groups, the number of people who requested Physiotherapy for the same pathology.

Measurements and main results: A statistical analysis contrasting equality of proportions by analysing contingency tables with the Chi2 test was performed. During the monitoring period five new treatments in group A (10%) and 29 in B (30%) were requested, which meant a significant difference between the two groups with a p < 0.01 confirmed by an analysis of remainders.

Conclusions: Incorporating health education into the Physiotherapist's activities provided in the medium term fewer requests from relapsed patients. It would be interesting to perform longer studies to check if these differences last.