Background and Purpose: Although various strategies are used to motivate patients during rehabilitation, consensus regarding the optimal motivational strategies for stroke rehabilitation has not been established. Expert consensus may aid rehabilitation professionals in effectively utilizing motivational strategies to produce the most beneficial outcome for their patients. The primary purpose of this study was to provide a comprehensive list of effective motivational strategies based on consensus among rehabilitation experts, generated using the Delphi technique. In addition, we sought to identify the types of information that are important when selecting motivational strategies.
Methods: A total of 198 rehabilitation experts participated in a three-round Delphi survey. The rehabilitation experts included physicians, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech-language-hearing therapists who had worked in stroke rehabilitation for at least five years. Panelists were asked to rate the effectiveness of motivational strategies and to rate the importance of different types of information using a 5-point Likert scale. Consensus was defined as having been reached for items with an interquartile range of 1 or less.
Results: A total of 116 experts (58.6%) completed the third round of the Delphi survey. Consensus was reached on all of the 26 presented strategies. Seven strategies, such as control of task difficulty and goal setting, were considered to be very effective in increasing patient motivation. In addition, all 11 of the presented types of information were deemed very important or important in determining which motivational strategies to use.
Conclusions: We generated a list of effective motivational strategies for stroke rehabilitation based on expert consensus. Our results suggest that experts consider a comprehensive range of patient information when choosing motivational strategies. These findings represent a group of consensus-based recommendations for increasing patient adherence to stroke rehabilitation programs, which may be beneficial to many medical professionals working in stroke rehabilitation.