Content Validation of Athletic Therapy Clinical Presentations in Canada

Abstract

Context: Competency-based education requires strong planning and a vehicle to deliver and track students' progress across their undergraduate programs. Clinical presentations (CPs) are proposed as 1 method to deliver a competency-based curriculum in a Canadian undergraduate athletic therapy program.Objective: Validation of 253 CPs.Setting: Canadian universities/colleges and clinical practices.Patients or Other Participants: Six Canadian Athletic Therapists Association-accredited program directors and 6 athletic therapists with at least 10 years of experience working in both field and clinical athletic therapy settings.Intervention(s): We surveyed 12 experts who rated the importance and difficulty of 253 CPs using a 100-mm and electronic visual analog scale with extremely important at 1 anchor and irrelevant at the other end. Difficulty was measured in a similar manner anchored by extremely difficulty and extremely easy.Main Outcome Measure(s): Descriptive statistics for importance and difficulty were tabulated on all CPs. An importance-difficulty index was calculated as a mean score of both importance and difficulty scores.Results: Data were converted into quartiles to represent a 4-point categorical importance scale to mimic the original categories from the Ebel procedure (ie, essential, important, acceptable, and questionable). Difficulty was likewise converted into quartiles representing a 4-point categorical difficulty scale. Mean importance scores ranged from 99.3 for airway management (ie, most important) to 54 for high altitude cerebral edema (ie, less important). Clinical presentation difficulty scales ranged from 89.8 for biceps contusion (ie, easier) to 21.2 for decompression illness (ie, harder).Conclusions: These 253 CPs are thought to be representative (ie, valid) of the athletic therapy scope of practice in Canada. To our knowledge, CPs have not been developed in the athletic therapy context prior to this research. We anticipate more will be identified as these CPs are used to align teaching, learning, and assessment within competency-based athletic therapy programs in Canada.