Physiotherapist Communication Skills Questionnaire (Polish Version): A New Scale for Assessing the Communication Skills of Physiotherapists and Physiotherapy Students

Objective: Optimal healthcare delivery relies on strong communication skills, which ideally are introduced in physiotherapy programs and honed with continuing vocational education. Existing general social skills tests do not have robust enough communication components to assess the communication skills of health professionals in clinical settings. The aim of the present study is to validate a newly created communicative skills questionnaire tailored to physiotherapists and physiotherapy students. Methods: In the first stage, 188 students aged 17–30 years (M=19.95; SD=1.510), including 80 males from the first (n=110) and second (n=78) years of undergraduate physiotherapy studies at Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education in Warsaw (AWF), were included in the study to test reliability and determine the factor structure of the Physiotherapist Communication Skills Questionnaire being created (PCS-Q -17). In the second stage of the research, 109 physiotherapy students, including 47 males and 62 females aged 18–24 years (M=20.68; SD=1.471), were surveyed to determine test validity by establishing relationships with the results of questionnaires examining general social skills (the Social Competence Questionnaire, SCQ) and emotional intelligence (the Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire INTE).

Results: Based on the analysis of the communication process between the physiotherapist and the client, 17 statements were created describing behaviors that are a manifestation of communication skills in the therapeutic relationship. When assessing the reliability of items, two items with poor correlations with the overall score were removed. Based on the factor analysis using the principal component method with Varimax rotation and Kaiser normalization, three factors explaining 60.68% of the common variance were extracted. The final version of the PCS-Q contains 15 items with a five-point response format forming three scales: Management Skills, Assertiveness, and Relationship-Building Skills, with Cronbach alpha for the individual scales of 0.876, 0.808, and 0.739, respectively, and α = 0.908 for the whole tool. The validity of the scale was confirmed by the expected correlations with the SCQ and INTE scales.

Conclusion: The Polish version of the Physiotherapist Communication Skills Questionnaire (PCS-Q) was found to be a reliable and valid tool for measuring the communication skills with the patient in clinical situations revealed by physiotherapists and physiotherapy students. It allows for assessing patient management, assertiveness, and relationship-building. At the individual level, the PCS-Q can be used as a self-assessment scale, or it can be used corporately by external raters to estimate skills via observation.