PREVALENCE OF LOW BACK PAIN IN HOME-BASED PHYSICAL THERAPISTS

BACKGROUND To find out the prevalence and to highlight the risk factors of low back pain in home-based physical therapist. STUDY DESIGN AND SAMPLING TECHNIQUE A cross-sectional survey study with non-probability convenience sampling technique STUDY SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS 200 physical therapists that were doing home patients in Karachi, either without or with their jobs were the part of this study. They were either self-employed or affiliated to different hospitals. DATA COLLECTING TOOL AND DATA ANALYSIS A questionnaire was used to collect data, which was adopted from Nordic questionnaire and other researches. The collected data was analyzed on SPSS 20. RESULTS 93 % home-based physical therapists had experienced the work-related pain or discomfort in the last 12 months. Among them the low back is the highly affected site with prevalence of 81.5%. Their working status of job in physical therapy department or academics with home-based physical therapy had a significant difference in presence or absence of work related pain or discomfort. CONCLUSION This study shows that home-based physical therapists are more prone to develop work-related problems and had higher prevalence of work-related LBP. This may be due to more work load, lower bed height of home patients, poor ergonomics at homes of patients and poor posture of physical therapists.