A preliminary analysis of physical therapist agreement regarding the perceived impairments in cases of runners with knee pain.

Background: There is a scarcity of evidence describing how physical therapists use data from clinical examinations to inform the treatment of runners with knee pain.

Objective: Our purpose was to examine the between physical therapist agreement on the selection of perceived impairments in runners with knee pain.

Methods: Twelve physical therapists reviewed two cases of runners with knee pain. The cases included clinical subjective information, objective data, and review of videos of each participant running. Each rater selected up to three perceived impairments (from a list of eight) that each physical therapist would address at the next physical therapy session. Percent agreement was calculated to determine the between rater agreement on each individual perceived impairment selection and Fleiss Kappa was calculated for each unique combination of three perceived impairments per case.

Results: Twelve raters with 51 (18-156) months of clinical experience participated. Percent agreement ranged from 8%-100% for both cases for individual impairments. When assessing the unique combination of three impairments selected, inter-rater agreement was less than what is expected due to chance alone (κ = -0.09, = .92; κ = -0.09, = .98) for both cases.

Conclusion: The 12 physical therapists demonstrated poor to excellent levels of agreement when selecting an individual perceived impairment. Agreement was worse than chance when selecting a combination of three unique impairments.