Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

This project aims to support chiropractic students' use of self-management support strategies when treating individuals with neck or back pain. Clinical practice guidelines recommend that chiropractors offer self-management support to patients with such pain. Self-management support consists of helping patients to participate in the decisions and activities that will lead to healthy behaviours, such as increasing their physical activity. However, self-management support is not part of chiropractors' current practice. We plan to address this gap between the recommended practices and those used in clinic, by preparing future chiropractors to offer self-management support during their professional training. To do so, we will collaborate with Canada's largest chiropractic training institution, the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC). We will first identify the factors that affect the use of self-management support strategies, by conducting interviews with patients having neck or back pain and focus groups with chiropractic students. Taking those factors into account, we will design an intervention including videos on how to use self-management support strategies. The 20 patient-management teams of CMCC will randomly be assigned to two groups, one receiving and the other not receiving the intervention. To evaluate the effects of this intervention, measures related to students' use of self-management support strategies and to patients' health (e.g., pain) will be collected before and after the intervention, using medical charts and questionnaires, and will be compared between the two groups. This project will contribute to improve the training offered to students in chiropractic and the services delivered to individuals with neck and back pain, thereby improving patient health outcomes.