Spinal pain patients seeking care in primary care and referred to physiotherapy: A cross-sectional study on patients characteristics, referral information and physiotherapy care offered by general practitioners and physiotherapists in France

OBJECTIVES: To describe spinal pain patients referred by their treating general practitioners to physiotherapy care, examine to which extent physiotherapy interventions proposed by general practitioners and physiotherapists were compliant to evidence based recommendations, and evaluate concordance between providers in terms of diagnosis and contraindications to physiotherapy interventions. METHODS: This study included spinal pain patients recruited from a random sample of sixty French physiotherapists. Physiotherapists were asked to supply patients’ physiotherapy records and characteristics from the general practitioner’s physiotherapy referral for the five new consecutive patients referred to physiotherapy. General practitioner’s physiotherapy referral and physiotherapists’ clinical findings characteristics were analyzed and compared to evidence-based recommendations using Chi-squared tests. Cohen’s kappas were calculated for diagnosis and contraindications to physiotherapy interventions. RESULTS: Three hundred patients with spinal pain were included from sixty physiotherapists across France. The mean age of the patients was 48.0 ± 7.2 years and 53% were female. The most common spinal pain was low back pain (n = 147). Diagnoses or reason of referral formulated by general practitioners were present for 27% of all patients (n = 82). Compared to general practitioners, physiotherapists recommended significantly more frequently recommended interventions such as education, spinal exercises or manual therapy. General practitioners prescribed significantly more frequently passive physiotherapy approaches such as massage therapy and electrotherapy. The overall proportion of agreement beyond chance for identification of a diagnosis or reason of referral was 41% with a weak concordance (κ = 0.19; 95%CI: 0.08–0.31). The overall proportion of compliant physiotherapists was significantly higher than for general practitioners (76.7% vs 47.0%; p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: We found that information required for the referral of spinal pain patients to physiotherapy is often incomplete. The majority of general practitioners did not conform to evidence-based recommendations in terms of prescribed specific physiotherapy care; in contrast to a majority of physiotherapists. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04177121