Physical Activity Counselling and Exercise Prescription Practices of Physiotherapists in Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Physiotherapists (PTs) have education and scope of practice to promote the benefits of physical activity (PA) and prescribe exercise in their clinical interactions with patients. As such, they provide an avenue to increase the reach of Exercise is Medicine, to improve the PA levels of the Canadian population. However, no study has assessed Canadian physiotherapists’ perceptions and practices surrounding physical activity counselling and exercise prescription (PAE). METHODS: PTs working in Nova Scotia (n=146) completed an online self-reflection survey regarding their current practices, confidence, barriers, and facilitators in providing PAE to their patients. RESULTS: Overall confidence for PAE was high (most scores >80%) except for in helping patients maintain PA (72.8±25%) and in patients following through on PAE recommendations (66.3±22.5%). PTs include PAE in 85±23% of appointments and prescribe written exercise in 80±20% of appointments, but only refer to other exercise professionals or facilities in 27±27% of appointments. The most salient barriers to providing PAE were patient’s interest in PA, and patients’ preference for medication management over lifeestyle intervention (2.36±0.68 and 2.11±0.66 respectively, out of 4), exceeding the typically cited barrier of lack of provider time. The most helpful facilitator was PTs’ perceived patients’ readiness to do PAE (3.5±0.7, out of 4). PTs are most comfortable providing PAE advice to those with arthritis and musculoskeletal issues (81%) and least comfortable to those with cancer (49%), insulin requiring diabetes (33%), respiratory disease (32%) and mental health concerns (28%). CONCLUSION: The primary barriers for PTs in providing PAE are patient-focused and PTs may benefit from avenues that allow greater referral access to other exercise professionals and a collaborative treatment approach to help patients maintain a physically active lifestyle, especially in those with other chronic disease beyond musculo-skeletal disorders. Exercise is Medicine networks should consider greater collaborations between allied health and exercise professionals to support multi-disciplinary approaches to patient exercise management across the continuum of health care. Support provided by: Lawson Foundation, Nova Scotia Health Authority
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".