Intra-rater Reliability of the ECHOWS Tool for Real-time Assessment of Physical Therapy Student Interviewing Skills: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Purpose: Development of patient interviewing skills are a component of all healthcare education. The physical therapist-patient interview includes some areas that are unique to the practice of physical therapy. Boissonnault et al. developed the ECHOWS tool, designed specifically to assess how effectively and efficiently the student physical therapist (SPT) performs a patient-interview, or history. The purpose of this pilot study was to determine the reliability of the ECHOWS tool for use in real-time student interviews of patients at a student-run free clinic. Methods: The study is a quasi-experimental design with collection of quantitative data. The subjects included twenty-two SPTs who had previously volunteered to work as student clinicians at the student-run free clinic. Results: A total of twenty-two interviews included complete data, nineteen with patients with primary orthopedic diagnoses and three with patients with primary neurological diagnoses. The reliability between the ECHOWS scores for real-time patient interviews by SPTs and videotapes for the same interview, ranged from 0.78 to 0.88, demonstrating excellent intra-rater reliability. Discussion: The ECHOWS tool demonstrated excellent intra-rater reliability between the assessment of real-time student–patient interactions and the assessment of videotaped interactions. This analysis is the first assessment of the tool's intra-rater reliability using real-time SPT interviews on actual patients. Keywords: Entry-level education, Service learning, Teaching and learning