Does your patient education material for low back pain meet patients' information and education needs? Preliminary development of a new checklist.

INTRODUCTION

Patients lack knowledge and have unhelpful beliefs about low back pain, which are associated with worse outcomes. Education may improve knowledge and modify beliefs and is recommended as a first-line low back pain treatment. However, low back pain guidelines are vague in their education recommendations and patients report rarely receiving education in from their family doctor. Those receiving education often report unclear and inconsistent information across resources that do not address their needs. Patient education materials can be used to facilitate the provision of credible, clear and consistent information to address patients' needs, but no tool has been developed to assess if they contain information patients want to know, or information providers want patients to know.

OBJECTIVES

To (i) identify a list of items describing information that patients want to know about and that educators want patients to know about related to low back pain and (ii) organize them into a checklist with a coding scheme for future pilot testing.

METHODS

We reviewed the literature to inform working definitions of patients' information needs (what patients want to know more about) and education needs (what experts identified patients lack knowledge about). Using these definitions, we found two recent systematic reviews investigating patients' information needs, attitudes, and beliefs about low back pain. We used the constant comparative method to conduct a content analysis of the data from these reviews into codes and categories relating to patients' needs, from which we generated items. Patient partners and clinician researchers assessed face validity. A clinician researcher pre-tested the checklist to minimize measurement error.

RESULTS

We developed a checklist comprising 21 items about prognosis, diagnosis, treatment, causes, aetiology, prevention, functional anatomy, activities of daily living, and pain neuroscience education. A small group of patients and clinician researchers judged the checklist to have acceptable face validity.

CONCLUSION

We developed a novel checklist comprising 21 distinct patient information and education needs about low back pain. It is intended to assess whether patient education materials about low back pain contain information about these needs, but its development is preliminary in nature and further validation is required.