Developing a Culture of Research Among Therapists in a Large Practice Setting
Purpose/Hypothesis: Many studies have reported favorable findings related to evidence-based practice and research utilization among therapists in clinical practice. They predominantly investigated barriers to research and do not provide insight into front-line clinicians who want to develop greater capacity to conduct research. Therapists who work directly with patients have insights and understandings that may have the greatest potential to affect patient outcomes. The purpose of this study was to 1) develop a greater understanding of the perceptions that influence physical therapists (PT) and occupational therapists (OT) decisions to engage in research activities, 2) identify resources and professional development opportunities that support therapists’ research activities, 3) determine if there is a difference between therapists who have successfully developed research initiatives and those who were predominately focused on clinical care.
Number of Subjects: PT (n= 66) and OT (n = 21) employed by a large academic healthcare system.
Materials and Methods: A mixed-methods, concurrent triangulation design was used to analyze items and the open-ended response provided by 87 therapists in response to the survey. Items assessed research capacity across five factors that may be critical to initiating and executing research projects that included participant’s current role in research, knowledge regarding research design, understanding of measurement, recommendations to enhance research capacity and comfort with research ethics. Items were scaled using a 0 (not at all) to 100 (extremely) scale with five corresponding open-ended questions which were content analyzed. Resulting themes were used to contextualize survey responses.
Results: Results suggest that organizationally sanctioned training that encourages and facilitates research activities may play a critical role in the development of research activities initiated by practicing therapists. Therapists who voluntarily participated in a formal clinical research training program designed for therapists were significantly more likely to report that they are were comfortable with research design, selecting appropriate tools/ methods to evaluate outcomes and managing ethical considerations. They perceived greater-levels of protected time and were significantly more likely to indicate proposing new research.
Conclusions: The findings reported suggest that both organizational barriers and individual-level facilitators addressed concurrently may have the greatest impact in developing research involvement by front-line providers.
Clinical Relevance: Professional organizations promote research but initiating research in clinical practice is challenging. Therapists need protected time and may require support transitioning from “practitioner” to “scientist-practitioner”. Formal clinical research training program designed for practicing therapists, collaborations with researchers and funders are important.