Assessing Physiotherapists’ Adherence to Clinical Practice Guidelines for Ankle Sprain Management in Saudi Arabia: A Cross-Sectional Study with National Online Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Objectives: Ankle sprain is one of the most common sports injuries globally. Despite its prevalence, the adequacy of knowledge in managing ankle sprain among physiotherapists in Saudi Arabia has not been assessed. This study aimed to assess the knowledge and degree of adherence to clinical practice guidelines (CPG) for the management of ankle sprains among physiotherapists. Methods: This study was a cross-sectional with national online questionnaire administered to participants through an online platform. It comprised three sections. The first section collected demographic data. The second section presented two clinical cases as the basis for the participants’ management decisions (the first with negative Ottawa Ankle Rules (OAR) and the second with positive OAR); participants were classified as “following”, “partially following”, “not following”, and “partially not following” the CPGs. In the third section, on a Likert scale (1–5), participants indicated how much they agreed with various CPGs statements. Results: A total of 381 physiotherapists (mean age: 28 ± 5; male: 57.1%) completed the questionnaire. In the case of acute ankle sprain with negative OAR, 0.2% of the participants were considered as “following” CPGs, 31.4% as “partially following”, 19.6% as “partially not following”, and 48.5% as “not-following”. In the case of acute ankle sprain with positive OAR, 5.2% were considered as “following” CPGs, 55.9% as “partially not following”, and 38.8% as “not following”. The knowledge assessment section elicited a 50% agreement among the participants on the 11 provided statements. Conclusions: Most physiotherapists have suboptimal adherence to CPG for managing ankle sprains, thus highlighting an evidence-to-practice gap.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".