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Physical activity promotion for people with spinal cord injury: Physiotherapists’ beliefs and actions.

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-10-24, 13:20 authored by Toni L. Williams, Brett M. Smith, Anthony PapathomasAnthony Papathomas
Purpose: It is vital that people with spinal cord injury (SCI) lead a physically active lifestyle to promote long term health and well-being. Yet within rehabilitation and upon discharge into the community, people with SCI are largely inactive. Physiotherapists are well placed to promote a physically active lifestyle and are valued and trusted messengers of physical activity (PA) by people with SCI. Therefore this study aimed to explore the perceptions of physiotherapists in SCI rehabilitation on PA for people with SCI, and what is done to promote PA. Method: Semi-structured interviews were completed with eighteen neurological physiotherapists (2-22 years experience) from SCI centres in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Framed by interpretivism, an inductive thematic analysis was conducted. Results: Three themes were identified: 1) perceived importance of PA; 2) inconsistent PA promotion efforts; and 3) concern regarding community PA. Conclusions: This article makes a significant contribution to the literature by identifying that although physiotherapists value PA, active promotion of PA remains largely absent from their practice. To enable physiotherapists to promote and prescribe PA as a structured and integral component of their practice, effective knowledge strategies need designing and implementing at the macro, meso and micro levels of healthcare.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Disability and Rehabilitation

Citation

WILLIAMS, T.L., SMITH, B.M. and PAPATHOMAS, A., 2018. Physical activity promotion for people with spinal cord injury: Physiotherapists’ beliefs and actions. Disability and Rehabilitation, 40(1), pp.52-61.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-09-26

Publication date

2018

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Disability and Rehabilitation on 05 Dec 2016, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2016.1242176

ISSN

1464-5165

Language

  • en