Abstract
BackgroundEven though Swedish national guidelines for stroke care (SNGSC) have been accessible for nearly a decade access to stroke rehabilitation in out-patient health care vary considerably. In order to aid future interventions studies for implementation of SNGSC, this study assessed the feasibility and acceptability of study procedures including analysis of the context in out-patient health care settings.MethodsThe feasibility and acceptability of recruitment, observations and interviews with managers, staff and patients were assessed, as well as the feasibility of surveying health care records.ResultsTo identify patients from the the hospitals was feasible but not from out-patient care where a need to relieve clinical staff of the recruitment process was identified. Assessing adherence to guidelines and standardized evaluations of patient outcomes through health care records was found to be feasible and suitable assessment tools to evaluate patient outcome were identified. Interviews were found to be a feasible and acceptable tool to survey the context of the health care setting.ConclusionIn this feasibility study a variety of qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures and measures were tested. The results indicate what can be used as a set of feasible and acceptable data collection procedures and suitable measures for studying implementation of stroke guidelines in an out-patient health care context.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-015-1177-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Even though Swedish national guidelines for stroke care (SNGSC) have been accessible for nearly a decade access to stroke rehabilitation in out-patient health care vary considerably
Stroke care and rehabilitation The Swedish National Guidelines for Stroke Care (SNGSC) targeted in this study are based on the principles of equal care, greatest support to those in greatest need and cost effectiveness, and provide a systematic review of current scientific knowledge for policy makers, managers and health practitioners [1, 2]
These findings indicate the necessity of bridging the gap between evidence-based knowledge and practice, and the need to explore ways to successfully facilitate the implementation of the national guidelines in clinical out-patient settings
Summary
Even though Swedish national guidelines for stroke care (SNGSC) have been accessible for nearly a decade access to stroke rehabilitation in out-patient health care vary considerably. The mean percentage of patients in Sweden that expressed unmet needs of rehabilitation during the first year after stroke was as high as 41 % and reached 53 % in certain regions [6]. These findings indicate the necessity of bridging the gap between evidence-based knowledge and practice, and the need to explore ways to successfully facilitate the implementation of the national guidelines in clinical out-patient settings
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