Building Consensus on an Integrated Care Pathway in Geriatric Rehabilitation: A Modified Delphi Study Among Professional Experts

Abstract

To improve continuity and coordination of care in geriatric rehabilitation, an integrated care pathway was developed in the south of the Netherlands. This study aims to reach nationwide consensus on the content and structure of this locally developed pathway using a two-round Delphi study with specialized elderly care physicians ( n = 37) as experts. In the first round, experts indicated their level of agreement on 65 statements representing the pathway on a 5-point Likert-type scale. Statements that did not gain consensus (interquartile range > 1) were redistributed to participants in Round 2. Consensus was reached on 56 statements (86%) after Round 1 and on 60 statements (92%) after Round 2. In total, 53 statements were assessed as relevant, seven statements were considered irrelevant, and five statements did not reach consensus. We conclude that there is broad nationwide consensus on the pathway, which therefore has the potential to be disseminated and implemented on a wider scale.

A Delphi Based Approach to the Assessment of New Marine Litter Reduction and Processing Technologies

“…As examples of works using just a single measure, we have the following: percentage of agreement (Mubarak et al, 2019;Bhandari et al, 2020;Nasa et al, 2021;Frew et al, 2021;Shaw et al, 2021); mean (Barzekar et al, 2011). Examples of works using cumulative measures are: IQR and mean (De Brito et al, 2017); IQR and median (Rezapour et al, 2019;Everink et al, 2020); IQR and percentage of agreement (Chen and Jiang, 2020;Guerin et al, 2020); percentage of agreement and median (Ahmed et al, 2021); percentage of agreement and mean (Santos et al, 2018); mean, median and percentage of agreement (Lima-Rodrıǵuez et al, 2013); IQR, median and percentage of agreement (Bentley et al, 2016;Price et al, 2020).…”