Awareness of Physiotherapy Interventions among Medical practitioners of Uttar Pradesh

ABSTRACT
Background: Physiotherapy is a kind of science which helps and supports the patient to live a healthy lifestyle. It plays a crucial role in rehabilitating a patient. Physiotherapy is defined as a health care profession dealing with human mobility and function maximizing quality on one’s life and movement strength within the loop of prevention, promotion, treatment/intervention, habilitation and rehabilitation. Still, there are people who aren’t aware about the kind of treatment it can provide. In order to make attempts to make people aware, it is necessary to evaluate the level of awareness among medical practitioners. Hereby, objective of this study is to find out how much aware the medical practitioners are in terms of importance and need of physiotherapy for the treatment of the patients.
Materials and Methods: Apparently, a cross sectional pilot study was carried out based purely on questionnaire method, prior to the data collection the content validation of the questionnaire was executed by online Delphi method. Questions wording and the order of the questions underwent review by experts in the field of physiotherapy. Valid and approved questionnaire was sent through Google form link for the data collection. All willing medical practitioners from different streams along with graduates and super specialists were included, whereas students and non internet users were excluded. Responses of each and every participant were analyzed and were represented in percentage, graph or pie charts.
Result: There is awareness regarding the term physiotherapy (98.4%), but specialization in physiotherapy is less known, maximum of the subjects were aware about specialization in orthopedics and specialization in women’s health, community based rehabilitation and dermatology is least known. It was found out that 79% of the medical practitioners have objection in physiotherapist having first contact with the patient. Moreover, only 67.7% of the participants agreed to let a physiotherapist decide the physiotherapy treatment protocol.
Conclusion: The study revealed that there is lack of awareness regarding assessment and treatment protocol provided by physiotherapy. However, doctors believe physiotherapist has big role in treating ICU and immobilized patients. There is less information regarding radiation modalities as well as recent advances in rehabilitation.
Keywords: medical practitioners, awareness, physiotherapist, rehabilitation.