Abstract
BackgroundHealthcare providers play a key role in supporting people with chronic low back pain to self-manage their condition. The study aimed at exploring how health care providers understand and conceptualize self-management and how they provide self-management support for people with chronic low back pain in Ethiopia.MethodsHealth care providers who have supported people with low back pain, including medical doctors and physiotherapists, were approached and recruited from three hospitals in Ethiopia. This study employed an interpretive descriptive approach using semi-structured interviews.FindingsTwenty-four participants (7 women; 17 men) with a median age of 28 (range 24 to 42) years and a median of 9.5 years (range 1 to 11 years) of helping people with chronic low back pain were interviewed. Seven major themes related to health care providers’ understanding of self-management support for people with chronic low back pain in Ethiopia emerged. The findings show that self-management was a new concept to many and health care providers’ had a fragmented understanding of self-management. They used or suggested several self-management support strategies to help people with CLBP self-manage their condition without necessarily focusing on enhancing their self-efficacy skills. The participants also discussed several challenges to facilitate self-management support for people with chronic low back pain. Despite the lack of training on the concept, the providers discussed the potential of providing self-management support for people with the condition.ConclusionsSelf-management was a new concept to health care providers. The providers lack the competencies to provide self-management support for people with chronic low back pain. There is a need to enhance the health care providers’ self-management support competencies through training.
Highlights
Low back pain (LBP) is the single largest contributor to years lived with disability globally [1, 2]
Self-management was a new concept to health care providers
This approach enabled us to explore health care providers’ understanding of self-management for people with chronic low back pain (CLBP) in Ethiopia, which would have been difficult to address with other traditional qualitative approaches [41, 43]
Summary
Low back pain (LBP) is the single largest contributor to years lived with disability globally [1, 2]. While there is generally an upward trend in the global prevalence of LBP-related disability [5], these numbers are projected to increase exponentially in low-andmiddle-income countries due to the increasing use of ineffective pain management strategies [9]. The literature indicates that the health systems in these countries face the dual burden of infectious and chronic non-communicable diseases [10]. Healthcare providers play a key role in supporting people with chronic low back pain to self-manage their condition.
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