The impact of domiciliary physiotherapy services on older persons living in the community

Abstract

Primarily the purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of domiciliary physiotherapy services on its users: the older persons living in the community and their caregivers. Twelve patients, aged between 62 and 97 years, (mean= 82.17; S.D. = ±10.29) and their caregivers whose ages ranged between 26 and 82 years, (mean= 58.17; S.D. = ±20.47) participated in this study. A structured interview was designed by the researcher to gather the information that was deemed to be related to or indicative of the impact that domiciliary physiotherapy services had on the caregivers. The Functional Index Measure (F.I.M.) was used to measure and compare the functional status of the patient pre- and post-rehabilitation. Following this data collection, the raw results were analyzed using one-way Anova test to compare the mean difference scores between several independent groups, as well as the Pearson Correlation Coefficient to measure the relationship between two quantitative variables. Findings in this study indicated that there was no statistical significance (p = >0.05) in functional improvement in patients as indicated by F.I.M. following domiciliary physiotherapy intervention. There was no statistical significance (p = >0.05) in functional improvement of patients as indicated by F.I.M. in relation to age of their caregivers, mode of referral or gender of patients. Overall the level of satisfaction of caregivers is high (83.33%).