Enhancing Clinical Decision Making in Physical Therapy
Physical therapy is a dynamic field that demands a combination of clinical expertise, effective communication, and critical thinking skills. This article explores key strategies for enhancing clinical decision-making in physical therapy practice. From improving communication techniques to mastering special tests and recognizing red flags, these approaches aim to empower physical therapists in delivering more accurate diagnoses and tailored treatment plans. By implementing these evidence-based methods, you can significantly improve patient outcomes and elevate the quality of care you provide.
Work on your communication skills.
Developing strong communication skills is essential for physical therapists to conduct effective subjective evaluations and make informed clinical decisions. When therapists enhance their ability to communicate, they create an environment where patients feel more comfortable sharing detailed information about their symptoms, concerns, and medical history. This increased openness will allow you to gather more comprehensive and accurate data, leading to a more thorough understanding of the patient’s condition. Effective communication also involves active listening, asking pertinent follow-up questions, and demonstrating empathy, all of which contribute to building trust with patients.
This deeper insight into the patient’s situation ultimately facilitates more accurate diagnoses, tailored treatment plans, and improved patient outcomes. By continuously working on communication skills, healthcare providers can significantly enhance their ability to perform fantastic subjective evaluations and make well-informed clinical decisions.
Ask great questions and demand great answers.
When we ask a patient where they hurt, most of the time they put their whole hand over the area. This gives us very limited information to guide our clinical judgement. Ask, “With one finger only, point to the epicenter of your pain.” Patients may struggle with this at first, but are usually able to point to one distinct location. Ask yourself, “What things could cause pain right there?” This helps you decide where to start your treatment. Also, if a patient insists that the pain is all throughout an entire region, we should be thinking about nerve or fascial involvement.
Know your special tests for every area of the body.
Special tests are essential diagnostic tools in physical examination, designed to help physical therapists differentiate between various potential conditions affecting specific areas of the body. These tests are carefully developed to isolate and assess particular structures or functions, providing valuable insights into the underlying cause of a patient’s symptoms. It is crucial for you to be well-versed in the appropriate special tests for each body region, as this knowledge enables more accurate and efficient diagnoses.
However, it’s important to note that relying on a single test can be misleading. Instead, therapists should utilize test clusters, which involve performing multiple related tests to create a more comprehensive and reliable assessment. This approach helps to confirm or rule out specific conditions with greater certainty, as it accounts for the potential variability in individual test results. By basing diagnostic decisions on test clusters rather than isolated tests, you can more effectively pinpoint the primary driver of a patient’s symptoms, leading to more targeted and effective treatment plans. This method not only improves diagnostic accuracy, but also enhances the overall quality of patient care.
Know your red flags.
When things don’t add up, trust your gut and refer the patient back to their doctor or to the emergency room, if necessary. Sometimes we hesitate because we don’t want to waste anyone’s time and money if we’re wrong, but like a physician once told me, “The worst that can happen is that we find out the patient is healthy. At best, you save their life.”
Use a test-treat-retest approach.
Let’s use the test-treat-retest approach on a patient with limited shoulder flexion with pain over the anterior humeral head for an example. You observe their quality of motion, measure their range of motion, and have the patient remember how it feels to reach overhead. Then, you treat their pectoralis minor muscle to help improve scapular posterior tilt during flexion. Next, have the patient once again perform shoulder flexion to see if there is a difference in their motion quality, range of motion, and/or pain. Ask, “Is it worse, the same, or better than before?”.
The order matters – by saying “worse” first, you give the really nice patients permission to be honest with you. Make sure the patient knows that this is only a data point, and you won’t be offended if something you treated didn’t help. If the patient says “better,” ask how much better (as a percentage). Any improvement of 50% or more indicates that you found a driver of their symptoms, and you should keep treating it. Anything less than 50% is involved, but you need to keep searching for the driver.
Start locally, then work globally.
When a patient comes to you with knee pain, start your manual treatment locally at their knee. If you can’t find a driver here, then move to their ankle or hip, and eventually to their pelvis and lumbar spine. Not only does starting locally make more sense to the patient (which helps build trust during the initial evaluation), but having a process in place for how you assess an area of the body ensures that local dysfunctions are not overlooked.
Enhancing clinical decision-making in physical therapy requires a multifaceted approach that combines effective communication, asking the right questions, and comprehensive knowledge of special tests and red flags. By implementing strategies such as the test-treat-retest method and adopting a local-to-global treatment approach, physical therapists can significantly improve their diagnostic accuracy and treatment efficacy. These evidence-based practices not only empower practitioners to deliver more tailored and effective care, but also foster better patient outcomes and trust. Ultimately, by continuously refining these skills and staying vigilant for potential red flags, physical therapists can elevate the quality of care they provide, ensuring optimal results for their patients and advancing the field of physical therapy as a whole.
Share this article:
