Peer Support for Low Back Pain
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Peer Support for Community Dwelling Older Adults to Facilitate Self Care of Chronic Low Back Pain
IRAS ID
135529
Contact name
Kay Cooper
Contact email
Research summary
Chronic Low Back Pain (CLBP) is a common and disabling condition among older adults that is largely managed through exercise and self care. Little is known about the best way of helping older adults with CLBP to self care, but peer support may prove to be an effective method. Peer support is where lay people receive a moderate amount of training to enable them to assist people with whom they have shared experiences. Peer support has been used successfully in other chronic conditions, but no study has explored peer support as a way of supporting older people with CLBP following physiotherapy. This is important to explore, since the aim of physiotherapy for CLBP is to facilitate people to self care in the longer term, but it is widely acknowledged that many people would like some support in order to achieve this.
This research will: (i) develop a peer support intervention and its associated training materials, and (ii) test the intervention on a small sample to determine whether it can be delivered as intended. The outcome will be an intervention that is ready for evaluating in a larger clinical study. Older adults with CLBP, physiotherapists, and potential peers will firstly be interviewed to ascertain their views on peer support and how an intervention should be delivered .
The intervention and its associated training materials will then be developed and reviewed by a small number of people who took part in the interviews. Finally, peers will be recruited and trained to deliver the intervention to older people with CLBP, following discharge from physiotherapy. The intervention and its delivery will be evaluated using a variety of methods (routine data collection, questionnaires, interviews) in order to inform a larger clinical study.
REC name
North of Scotland Research Ethics Committee 2
REC reference
13/NS/0094
Date of REC Opinion
15 Jul 2013
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion