Experience of Physical Rehabilitation in Empowering Individuals Living with Parkinson’s Disease: A Qualitative Study Protocol

ntroduction: Life expectancy is good, patients live with certain problems (tremors, difficulty in activities of daily living, cognitive impairment, lack of balance etc). Although mainstay treatment requires pharmacological treatment and regular physiotherapy. So, the first-hand experience of physiotherapy matters in these individuals. Need of the study: The present protocol will explore the experience of individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). It will help in exploring the patients’ physical and emotional experiences as they return to the community, their barriers, facilitators and also gaps they experience in their rehabilitation journey. Aim: To explore the experience of physical rehabilitation in empowering individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Materials and Methods: An open-ended interview guide was formed and validated by multidisciplinary experts. Both male and female above the age of 40 years, undergoing rehabilitation for atleast 6 months and having mild and moderate PD (Hoehn and Yahr stage I-III). No depression and anxiety is assessed on Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HADS); HADS-depression score=9, HAD-anxiety=8 will be recruited. It will have 17 open ended questions regarding the experiences after Physical Rehabilitation, Cognitive impairment’s, Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), Freezing, Balance, Facilitators, Barriers. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted and transcribed verbatim into English language, then entered into Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) miner software for analysis. The interview guide is validated by the experts and obtained an Itemlevel Content Validity Index (I-CVI) of all items/questions of 0.84-1 while Scale-level Content Validity Index (S-CVI) by Average method and Universal agreement is 0.914 and 0.647, respectively. Results will be depicted in form of word clouds and code tree.