Abstract:

Background:
The Physical Therapy Degree program is composed by several subjects which combine theory and practice. During the learning process, several assessment tools are given. In the end of their studies, students should have learnt more than 50 different scales and questionnaires which allow them to have a better comprehension of the physical, mental and functional state of patients, and to measure their progression over the healing process. Unfortunately, most of these resources are only presented in complex formats and the use of these scales is limited by the lack of availability in most cases. Due to the important role of the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which are the key to improve this situation and to facilitate the utilization of these tools, this project is carried out for easing the access of these scales and questionnaires.
The purpose of our project is to compile the most used assessment scales and questionnaires in a website (Physio-SQAT), in order to increase the accessibility of this kind of tools and to make its utilization easier. Our hypothesis is that this scales compilation will help the student to increase its efficiency when assessing a patient and to have a better understanding about health problems.

Methods:
To carrying out this project, several databases, medical books, and websites were visited to find the most used assessment scales and questionnaires. Interviews with university lecturers and professors were also performed in order to identify the assessment tools which are given during the Physical Therapy Degree. Once the most important scales were categorized, a website was designed in order to share these scales and questionnaires with the students of the third year of Physical Therapy Degree of University of Valencia. These scales were organized by the topography and the kind of disease that they were assessing. A questionnaire was filled by each student to evaluate different features such as satisfaction, accesibility, usefulness and efficacy.

Results:
Every variable showed high signification, specially accessibility and usefulness.

Conclusions:
These findings suggest that this tool is beneficial for the learning process, improving the acquisition of concepts in the Physical Therapy Degree.

Keywords:

Scales, questionnaires, physical therapy, information and communication technologies.