Implement Sci
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Multicenter Study Controlled Clinical Trial
Partnership for fragility bone fracture care provision and prevention program (P4Bones): study protocol for a secondary fracture prevention pragmatic controlled trial.
Fractures associated with bone fragility in older adults signal the potential for secondary fracture. Fragility fractures often precipitate further decline in health and loss of mobility, with high associated costs for patients, families, society and the healthcare system. Promptly initiating a coordinated, comprehensive pharmacological bone health and falls prevention program post-fracture may improve osteoporosis treatment compliance; and reduce rates of falls and secondary fractures, and associated morbidity, mortality and costs. ⋯ This pragmatic, controlled trial at 11 hospital sites in eight regions in Quebec, Canada, will recruit community-dwelling patients over age 50 who have sustained a fragility fracture to an intervention coordinated program or to standard care, according to the site. Site study coordinators will identify and recruit 1,596 participants for each study arm. Coordinators at intervention sites will facilitate continuity of care for bone health, and arrange fall prevention programs including physical exercise. The intervention teams include medical bone specialists, primary care physicians, pharmacists, nurses, rehabilitation clinicians, and community program organizers.The primary outcome of this study is the incidence of secondary fragility fractures within an 18-month follow-up period. Secondary outcomes include initiation and compliance with bone health medication; time to first fall and number of clinically significant falls; fall-related hospitalization and mortality; physical activity; quality of life; fragility fracture-related costs; admission to a long term care facility; participants' perceptions of care integration, expectations and satisfaction with the program; and participants' compliance with the fall prevention program. Finally, professionals at intervention sites will participate in focus groups to identify barriers and facilitating factors for the integrated fragility fracture prevention program.This integrated program will facilitate knowledge translation and dissemination via the following: involvement of various collaborators during the development and set-up of the integrated program; distribution of pamphlets about osteoporosis and fall prevention strategies to primary care physicians in the intervention group and patients in the control group; participation in evaluation activities; and eventual dissemination of study results.
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What supports physiotherapists' use of research in clinical practice? A qualitative study in Sweden.
Evidence-based practice has increasingly been recognized as a priority by professional physiotherapy organizations and influential researchers and clinicians in the field. Numerous studies in the past decade have documented that physiotherapists hold generally favorable attitudes to evidence-based practice and recognize the importance of using research to guide their clinical practice. Research has predominantly investigated barriers to research use. Less is known about the circumstances that actually support use of research by physiotherapists. This study explores the conditions at different system levels that physiotherapists in Sweden perceive to be supportive of their use of research in clinical practice. ⋯ Supportive conditions for physiotherapists' use of research exist at multiple interdependent levels, including the individual, workplace, and extra-organizational levels. Research use in physiotherapy appears to be an interactive and interpretative social process that involves a great deal of interaction with various people, including colleagues and patients.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Best strategies to implement clinical pathways in an emergency department setting: study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial.
The clinical pathway is a tool that operationalizes best evidence recommendations and clinical practice guidelines in an accessible format for 'point of care' management by multidisciplinary health teams in hospital settings. While high-quality, expert-developed clinical pathways have many potential benefits, their impact has been limited by variable implementation strategies and suboptimal research designs. Best strategies for implementing pathways into hospital settings remain unknown. This study will seek to develop and comprehensively evaluate best strategies for effective local implementation of externally developed expert clinical pathways. ⋯ This study will contribute to the body of evidence supporting effective strategies for clinical pathway implementation, and ultimately reducing the research to practice gaps by operationalizing best evidence care recommendations through effective use of clinical pathways.
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Determinants of practice are factors that might prevent or enable improvements. Several checklists, frameworks, taxonomies, and classifications of determinants of healthcare professional practice have been published. In this paper, we describe the development of a comprehensive, integrated checklist of determinants of practice (the TICD checklist). ⋯ Based on a systematic review and a consensus process we developed a checklist that aims to be comprehensive and to build on the strengths of each of the 12 included checklists. The checklist is accompanied with five worksheets to facilitate its use in implementation research and quality improvement projects.
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Measuring team factors in evaluations of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) may provide important information for enhancing CQI processes and outcomes; however, the large number of potentially relevant factors and associated measurement instruments makes inclusion of such measures challenging. This review aims to provide guidance on the selection of instruments for measuring team-level factors by systematically collating, categorizing, and reviewing quantitative self-report instruments. ⋯ Existing instruments cover many of the factors hypothesized to contribute to QI success. With further testing, use of these instruments measuring team factors in evaluations could aid our understanding of the influence of teamwork on CQI outcomes. Greater consistency in the factors measured and choice of measurement instruments is required to enable synthesis of findings for informing policy and practice.