Development of a Questionnaire for Assessing the Facilitators and Barriers Perceived by Stroke Patients Receiving Physiotherapy Treatment

Background: Physiotherapy benefits stroke patients by reducing pain, preventing complications, and enhancing quality of life. Adherence is crucial for successful treatment, yet many struggles. Addressing nonadherence causes is vital. Adherent patients have better outcomes, but poor adherence is common in physiotherapy. This study aims to develop and validate a questionnaire to analyse the challenges and facilitators that should be considered when giving physiotherapy treatment.Objective: To develop and validate the questionnaire for identifying facilitators and barriers among the stroke patients receiving physiotherapy treatment, between the relatives, medical management and stroke rehabilitation team and those that promote and inhibit stroke patients from receiving physiotherapy treatment.Methods: The questionnaire was developed in three phases: literature search, content validation and psychometric testing. The questionnaire items were derived from a thorough literature review suggesting all the facilitators and barriers perceived by stroke patients receiving physiotherapy. Face to face validation was done for the items of the questionnaire. The final version of the questionnaire contained two main and twelve sub domains. A total of 41 patients receiving physiotherapy or any other treatment were recruited from the tertiary care hospital and outpatient rehabilitation centre in Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar. Psychometric testing of the scale included content validation and reliability and validity testing.Results: The questionnaire, on reliability and validity test signifies good consistency- (Cronbach’s Alpha= 0.74. The KMO measure of sampling adequacy is 0.712 and Barlett’s test of Sphericity with approximate chi-square value is 96.085. These results are statistically significant at 5% level (p-value < 0.001). Hence all the statements are distributed normally. With reference to “initial Eigen values it is realized that 2 factors meet the cut-off criterion- Component 1 accounts for 38.586% the highest variability among components. The 2 components indicate cumulative % of 59.838% which is satisfactory for the overall variance explained which is assumed to be a standard.Conclusions: This study revealed key factors of adherence and nonadherence to the exercises among the stroke survivors receiving Physiotherapy treatment. The questionnaire has the possible potential to identify the contextual factors affecting the patients with stroke to access to the physiotherapy treatment.Keyword: Stroke, facilitators, barriers, questionnaire, physiotherapy.