Page 217 - THE DUTCH TALKING TOUCH SCREEN QUESTIONNAIRE
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CONCLUSIONS
The aim of the research project that was described within this thesis was to adapt a screening questionnaire and develop a tool which would help Dutch and Turkish physical therapy patients with inadequate HL to be more capable of taking an active part in the decision-making process within the diagnostic phase of physical therapy treatment in the Netherlands.
The current prototype of the TTSQ does not yet fully solve the problems native and minority patients with low HL have with completing the adapted questionnaire. Looking at the results of all studies presented in the current thesis, the prototype of the TTSQ needs to be improved in both usability and validity aspects. Much work needs to be done to further develop the TTSQ and test it on psychometric properties. Big challenges in future development and testing the TTSQ are the recruitment of vulnerable members of the hard-to-reach native and minority target populations and finding research methods that suit the abilities and needs of these participants. The TTSQ, as well as its development process, needs to be designed in a way that puts persons with low HL at ease and enables them to participate fully autonomously. The results presented in the current thesis offer starting points for further development of the TTSQ, but future research will need to prove whether or not adjustments will lead to the desired results. It will be a very challenging, labor- and time- consuming process to create a TTSQ which has good psychometric properties for use in a ‘real life patient population’, including native and minority patients with low HL. On the other hand, having a usable, valid and reliable TTSQ may well save a lot of time and money in both research and clinical practice in the future. If future research shows that the use of the TTSQ reduces costs and increases quality of care, investing in the development of a TTSQ which contains large amounts of questionnaires in various language versions may become interesting to health insurance companies and other investors. A structure in which community funds help finance the development and implementation process of the TTSQ, comparable to the way the projects of Hahn et al. are financed [15-21], will be indispensable in making further development of the TTSQ possible.
Based on the knowledge the current PhD thesis adds to already existing 211
General discussion
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