Abstract
BackgroundHealth professionals are required to collect data from standardized tests when assessing older patients’ functional ability. Such data provide quantifiable documentation on health outcomes. Little is known, however, about how physiotherapists and occupational therapists who administer standardized tests use test information in their daily clinical work. This article aims to investigate how test administrators in a geriatric setting justify the everyday use of standardized test information.MethodsQualitative study of physiotherapists and occupational therapists on two geriatric hospital wards in Norway that routinely tested their patients with standardized tests. Data draw on seven months of fieldwork, semi-structured interviews with eight physiotherapists and six occupational therapists (12 female, two male), as well as observations of 26 test situations. Data were analyzed using Systematic Text Condensation.ResultsWe identified two test information components in everyday use among physiotherapist and occupational therapist test administrators. While the primary component drew on the test administrators’ subjective observations during testing, the secondary component encompassed the communication of objective test results and test performance.ConclusionsThe results of this study illustrate the overlap between objective and subjective data in everyday practice. In clinical practice, by way of the clinicians’ gaze on how the patient functions, the subjective and objective components of test information are merged, allowing individual characteristics to be noticed and made relevant as test performance justifications and as rationales in the overall communication of patient needs.
Highlights
Health professionals are required to collect data from standardized tests when assessing older patients’ functional ability
By focusing on how test administrators in acute geriatric settings justify the use of test information in their everyday practice, this article investigates the complexities of everyday test information use, complexities that are relevant when test administrators are occupational therapist (OT) and PTs who are responsible for parts of the patients’ health care
Against the background of prior interactional work on the challenges of standardization, it seems appropriate to move our research focus to the everyday use of standardized test information and pose the following research questions: What information do the OT and PT test administrator collect from standardized tests? How do OT and PT test administrators use this information in their clinical work? While Tyson et al.’s [26] and Greenhalgh et al.’s [27] investigations targeted the uses of measurement tools and outcomes in multidisciplinary teams, we lack knowledge of how therapist test administrators use test information in their clinical work
Summary
Health professionals are required to collect data from standardized tests when assessing older patients’ functional ability. By focusing on how test administrators in acute geriatric settings justify the use of test information in their everyday practice, this article investigates the complexities of everyday test information use, complexities that are relevant when test administrators are OTs and PTs who are responsible for parts of the patients’ health care. This focus is partly driven by the fact that test information can be used to determine level of impairment, disability, or activity since test information offers quantifiable documentation on patients’ functional ability.
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