Developing and Testing the Usability of a Communication Tool to enhance Evidence into Practice - A qualitative pilot study

Abstract: Background: Meeting the prosthetists needs, and barriers is important to successful implement evidence into practice. Thus, several implementation methods have been initiated, the authors saw a need to create a Communication Tool based on evidence from transfemoral socket designs, to ease the process of assisting prosthetists in facilitating evidential reasoning.   Aim: To investigate if a Communication Tool can facilitate the usage of evidence into practice by assisting the clinical decision making.  Method: The study is divided into two parts. First the development of the Communication Tool, which is based on the Knowledge to Action model plus an update of studies from a systematic review by Brodie et al.2021. The second part consists of a qualitative pilot-study using semi-structured synchronously interviews to collect data from two Danish working prosthetists. For the analysis a conventional content analysis with an inductive approach was used.  Findings: Findings from the analysis of the interviews compiled eight categories and twenty-five sub-categories covering three key themes identified during the creation of the Communication Tool: Barriers, internal usability, and external usability of the Communication Tool.   Conclusion: The Communication Tool showed to be an effective method to assist and facilitate evidence-based reasonings. The participants found the tool to be useful and appraised positively regarding communicating relevant content an easy to navigate in. Minor improvements are needed, which are related to the quality assessment system and the system of reference as well as some linguistic formulations.