RERC: Wheeled Mobility in Everyday Life
PI: Stephen Sprigle, PhD, PT
The work of Dr. Sprigle's RUA began with the RUSH project's first RUA, which ran from February 2005 through January 2007. This earlier RUA funded the work of Laura Cohen, PT, PhD, ATP of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC): Wheeled Mobility in Everyday Life at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, GA. Her study measured the effect of a traditional continuing education program for clinicians entitled "Research Cliff Notes: Bringing Manual Wheelchair Research and Practice to Your Clinic." This project examined clinician knowledge, attitudes and practice behaviors before and after the training intervention.
Dr. Cohen gives an overview of how she designed this research utilization activity in her proposal for the first RUA. This RUA's final report and its appendices detail the findings.
Some of the outcomes from Dr. Cohen's work were presented at the 23rd International Seating Symposium, held March 8 - 10, 2007, in Orlando, FL, in a short course, "Effect of an educational research dissemination program on practice patterns for professionals recommending manual wheelchairs." She shared with RUSH a copy of the conference proceedings and PowerPoint slides from this presentation.
In February 2007, the RUSH project awarded Dr. Sprigle a RUA to compare the results of the face-to-face workshop to one that delivers the same content via a Web-based platform. He collaborates closely with Dr. Cohen. View the proposal for the follow-up RUA, the first update on project activity, and second update. In the third update, Sprigle and Cohen present demographic data related to the 39 participants in the web-based training, and present preliminary results of their pre and post-test.
In their final report (396kb MS Word document), Drs. Sprigle and Cohen summarize implications for applying these knowledge translation strategies:
A key assumption driving this study is that daily practice for "frontline" therapists is hectic. There is little time for keeping up-to-date with advances in research and technology. Clinicians have indicated that they are eager to be exposed to timely research literature in a format that is meaningful and easy to interpret and apply. Both the WBT (Web-based training) and the TCE (Traditional Continuing Education) were shown to be effective methods to transfer research knowledge and influence attitudes. TCE training appeared to do an overall better job at impacting attitudes but Web-based training did have positive influence on Leadership and Independence.
One explanation of the slightly more effective influence is that TCE allows much more interaction between participants and instructors and also included extensive ‘hands-on’ time with equipment. (…)
To achieve this interaction as part of the Web-based training, they point out that
It is feasible to enroll a cohort of participants to work through the Web course together in a predetermined timeframe. A schedule with deadlines to reach certain milestones in the curriculum would culminate in a synchronous webinar enabling instructor-class interaction. Also this same mode of delivery can enable ongoing instructor contact via email communications during the duration of the course.
In addition, another achievable option is to incorporate a mixed platform educational program that includes a TCE component for laboratory activities to include demonstration and trial. Transferring the laboratory activities to a Web-based curriculum was challenging. All of these concepts are viable options for future knowledge translation and dissemination programs.
