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S. Albahrouh1, A. Buabbas2
1Kuwait University, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Kuwait, Kuwait, 2Kuwait University, Faculty of Medicine, Kuwait, Kuwait
Background: The outbreak of COVID 19 induced the global governments to promote several protective measures to minimize the risk of exposure among population. One of these protective measures is to minimize the patient’s accessibility to the healthcare system especially those who are not considered as urgent cases. Physiotherapy therapy is one of the sectors that has to reduce face to face direct interactive sessions with patients. Telerehabilitaion considers as an alternative healthcare delivery system may handle this issue and many studies promote for its feasibility to deliver a suitable healthcare to the patients who live with pain and disability.
Purpose: To investigate the physiotherapists’ perceptions and willingness to use telerehabilitaion during COVID-19 pandemic in Kuwait and to explore issues that may cause not adopting telerehabilitation in this sector.
Methods: In this cross-sectional survey, an electronic questionnaire was sent to 747 physiotherapists who work in the governmental health sector. The questionnaire includes four sections: perceptions about telerehabilitaion, comfort with technology, willingness to use telerehabilitaion and barriers to adopt telerehabilitaion. In this study, we used descriptive data analysis and cross-tabulation technique to find associations of two variables, in which Chi-Square test was used to indicate the significance of the result, where p-value <0.05.
Results: Only 273 completed questionnaires were received, giving a response rate of 36.5 %. Most of the respondents (89.4%) consider telerehabilitaion as a viable option to deliver healthcare for patients during COVID- 19 and (96%) of physiotherapists had indicated the potential role of ICT in the care of patients in spite of lack of ICT system and equipment (60.4%). More than 80% of respondents were considerably willing to integrate the telerehabilitaion within their conventional practice in this current time. Issues to not adopt the telerehabilitaion were mostly selected by respondents: concerns of both patients’ privacy and confidentiality of their data, lack of suitable training in the use of equipment, lack of consultation between ICT experts and clinicians and lack of user-friendly software.
Conclusion(s): In response to COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare system has pushed to consider alternative mode to deliver healthcare, dominantly via telerehabilitaion. Physiotherapists in Kuwait revealed their willingness to consider such method to ease patients’ access to their intervention. Several barriers had addressed that may preventing the usage of telerehabilitaion, therefore, further studies regarding the usefulness and the feasibility of telerehabilitaion may require physiotherapy field.
Implications: To our knowledge, this study is the first to address the views of physiotherapist regarding using the telerehabilitaion during COVID-19 outbreak in Kuwait. This study will provide preliminary information regarding the acceptability of telerehabilitaion among physiotherapists that will help to make decisions and policies making around using telerehabilitaion services by physiotherapists during and after COVID-19 pandemic.
Funding, acknowledgements: The authors recieved no specific funding for this work
Keywords: Telerehabilitation, Physiotherapist Perceptions, COVID-19 Pandemic
Topic: Service delivery/emerging roles
Did this work require ethics approval? Yes
Institution: Ministry of Health of Kuwait
Committee: Standing Committee for Coordination of Health and Medical Research
Ethics number: 1478/2020
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
