Agreement between physiotherapists on quality of movement rated via videotape

Although achieving quality of movement after stroke is an important aim of physiotherapy it is rarely measured objectively or described explicitly.

To test whether physiotherapists agree on a composite measure of quality of movement. SETTING; A movement analysis laboratory

Ten stroke patients and 10 healthy age-matched volunteers.

Prospective correlational.

All subjects were videofilmed performing three trials of six standardized functional tasks. Two videotapes were made, each with a different randomized order of appearance of the trials. Ten senior physiotherapists independently rated the videotapes twice using a 100-mm visual analogue scale.

Analysis of variance models were fitted to transformed data. Estimates of components of variance were calculated and presented as a percentage of the total variance for differences, within subjects (intra-subject), between raters (inter-rater) and within raters (intra-rater). An acceptable percentage was set at less than 10%.

The percentage of intra-subject variance ranged from 1% (pick up box and walking) to 9% (step on block). The percentage of inter-rater variance ranged from 18% (pick up pencil) to 38% (sit to stand). The percentage of intra-rater variance was less than 1% for all tasks.

Although physiotherapists disagreed with each other on quality of movement they were more consistent in their own scoring.