Screening for Physical Activity in Family PracticeEvaluation of Two Brief Assessment Tools

Validity of two brief primary care physical activity questionnaires with accelerometry in clinic staff

“…The PAVS appears helpful to identify individuals that most need PA counseling from their primary care provider. The ability of SNAP to identify insufficient activity appears moderate, although still comparable to previously evaluated questionnaires that assess PA in primary care (Smith et al, 2005;Meriwether et al, 2006;Topolski et al, 2006). SNAP allows providers to tailor PA counseling because it identifies patients' stage of readiness to change their PA behavior.…”

“…Both the PAVS and SNAP were developed to be administered in the least amount of time possible without misclassifying activity levels of patients. The two-and three-question PA questionnaires evaluated by Smith et al (2005) (no names for questionnaires were provided), and the Exercise Vital Sign reported by Coleman et al (2012) are the shortest PA questionnaires reported to date, requiring a median of 1-2 min (Smith et al, 2005) and a mean of <1 min (Exercise Vital Sign) to complete. PA questions by Smith et al, however, demonstrated poor agreement with sufficient activity measured by accelerometry (10%), and were evaluated against earlier PA recommendations.…”

“…Challenges to assessing PA in primary care include having little time to do it while still making the assessment easy to understand. Existing PA assessments intended for use in primary care are too long and too complex, and do not reflect current ACSM/AHA aerobic PA recommendations (Glasgow et al, 2005;Smith et al, 2005;Meriwether et al, 2006;Topolski et al, 2006;Fernald et al, 2008).…”

Get Healthy, Stay Healthy: Evaluation of the Maintenance of Lifestyle Changes Six Months After an Extended Contact Intervention (Preprint)

“…Self-report physical activity included the number of weekly sessions spent: walking for ≥30 minutes; doing other moderate-intensity physical activity for ≥30 minutes (termed "moderate"); and, doing vigorous-intensity physical activity for ≥20 minutes [16]. Further, objectively-measured time spent engaged in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) was measured using the Actigraph GT1M -a dual-axis accelerometer.…”

Assessing physical activity in general practice: a disconnect between clinical practice and public health?

“…There are simple validated screening tests, taking only a few minutes to administer, for use in general practice. [20][21][22] However, time constraints make even these challenging, and this is reflected in their limited use by GPs. GPs also, without exception, perceived assessment to include eliciting all the information they need to manage physical inactivity, which is also time consuming.…”