What is Physical Therapy Outcome Measures

This chapter explains the design of a survey that provides a new technology for physical therapy clinicians to use while treating patients. The new survey uses both numerical subjective and written subjective questions; the questions dovetail knowledge from the fields of writing and medicine to provide a resource for patient education. Encouraging a patient to write how he or she feels throughout the physical therapy process can increase the clinician's awareness, allowing for the modification of treatment when needed to achieve elite results for the patient. Reading a patient's writing also helps the clinician become more aware of whether the patient has a positive or negative outlook throughout the recovery process. The patient's development and maintenance of a positive outlook becomes a goal of the clinician. From this survey, the authors learned patients with a higher positive outlook throughout treatment sessions demonstrated greater healing gains in existing objective physical therapy measures.