One year has passed and the European Journal of Physiotherapy (EJPT) has gained a lot attention from authors from different countries. We have increased the submission rate, which is very inspiring. The main goal for the coming year is further to spread the knowledge of the EJPT.
On research areas, there are many challenges and one of them is implementation research on different assessment and treatment methods in a PT framework. A quick search on the PEDro database showed that 3067 new clinical trials in physiotherapy have been rated on the database since 2012. Thus, there are probably several areas where the evidence today is sufficient to start conducting implementation research. From earlier research, we know that changing clinical practice is not an easy task independently of the profession. More is needed than just to inform clinicians of the latest research results.
In order to conduct effective implementation research and changes in the practice, we might be obligated to start thinking what it would be necessary to do before implementation of new methods in the clinic. Prasad & Ionnadis (Citation1) have recently discussed a topic they called de-implementation for health care practices. The authors discuss evidence-based abandonment (de-implementation) of ineffective and/or harmful methods for evaluation and treatment. Evidence for confronting barriers for behaviour change should also be used as de-implementation strategies. Barriers related to provider, patient, environment and therapy need to be taken to account when phasing out an assessment or treatment method.
To phase out treatments from clinical practice, those without evidence or those that are even harmful, i.e. decrease some behaviour, the same behavioural change techniques could be used as when increasing any behaviour. For example, there is evidence for increasing healthy eating and physical activity level with techniques like prompting intention formulation for behaviour change, specific goal setting for the new behaviour, self-monitoring of one's own behaviour, feedback on performance and review of the goals (Citation2). We might benefit from giving some thought to the de-implementation process through behaviour change techniques on an individual level when performing research on implementing new assessment and treatment methods in clinical practice.
References
- Prasad V, Ioannidis JP. Evidence-based de-implementation for contradicted, unproven, and aspiring healthcare practices. Implement Sci. 2014;9:1. doi: 10.1186/1748-5908-9-1.
- Michie S, Abraham C, Whittington C, McAteer J, Gupta S. Effective techniques in healthy eating and physical activity interventions: A meta-regression. Health Psychol. 2009;28:690–701.