Disabled children and home exercises: barriers to compliance with recommendations of therapists

Compliance to therapists’ recommendations on home exercise has an important role in success of rehabilitation programs for disabled children. This study intends to determine barriers to compliance of parents with recommended home exercises. In present survey, parents of all of the 60 disabled children who were receiving occupational therapy, speech therapy or physiotherapy at Birjand’s rehabilitation clinics during September 2009 were interviewed. Data was collected using a semi structured questionnaire developed and validated by the researchers, containing questions about compliance and 21 barriers to compliance with recommended home exercises. Pearson chi-square test and Fisher exact test were used to explore the risk of parental non-compliance to recommendations in case of facing each of the barrier. Independent sample t-test was used to explore the correlation of number of barriers with degree of parental compliance. Facing to barriers of “not having needed equipments for recommended exercises” (p=0/003), “child's dislike for doing exercises and parent's not willing to cause more stress”(p=0/024), “parent's concerns for injuring child by doing exercises” (p=0/027), “not having enough skills to do exercises” (p=0/047); were associated with increased risk of parental non-compliance with home exercises”. There was also a significant relationship between number of perceived barriers and degree of compliance. (p=0/008) It seems that designing exercises in a way that children would love them and emphasizing on helping parents acquire the tools, knowledge and expertise would improve parental compliance to home exercise.