Utility of the Quebec, ODI, and SF-36 Among Healthcare Workers with and Without Low Back Pain

Research Objectives: To investigate the agreement of three commonly used low back pain questionnaires among a healthcare worker population.

Design: This study is a correlational design utilizing the responses of healthcare workers with low back pain to the SF-36, the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), and the Quebec Back Pain Disability Scale (Quebec). This study was a one-time data collection event where healthcare workers who regularly engaged in manual patient handling filled out the three questionnaires to observe how they correlate with each other, which, if they correlate well, may indicate that one is not better at discriminating low back pain over another.

Setting: This study was performed on a university campus. The healthcare workers came to campus to fill out the back pain questionnaires, then after data collection were free to go about their business.

Participants: Participants were required to serve in a role as a healthcare worker where frequent manual patient handling was required. A total of 35 participants provided data for the study including professionals from occupational therapy, occupational therapy assistants, physical therapy, physical therapy assistants, nursing, and certified nursing assistants.

Interventions: No interventions were administered for this research study due to the correlational design of the study and the nature of the research question.

Main Outcome Measures: The measures were the SF-36, the Oswestry Disability Index, and the Quebec Back Pain Disability Scale. These are all commonly utilized low back pain questionnaires.

Results: A series of Spearman correlations was performed due to all samples being non-normally distributed followed by a Holm-Bonferroni multiple comparison adjustment to gauge significant correlations. Significant positive correlations were found between the ODI and the Quebec while significant negative correlations were found between the ODI and the SF-36 and the Quebec and the SF-36.

Conclusions: All three of these low back pain questionnaires correlate well and can thus be used interchangeably according to the interests and necessity of the facility. The most complex scoring system is found in the SF-36 which requires additional software to make sense of the responses, which may be a limiting factor for some facilities while the others do not require specialized software. Regardless, they can all be used as measures of low back pain to support and track intervention for this issue.

Author(s) Disclosures: There are no conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise.