In May, Jonathan Field, one of Back2Healths senior partners was an invited speaker at the World Chiropractic Federation conference in Athens. He presented a research paper looking at the suitability of chiropractic care for NHS patients, as well as workshops on how clinics can use their patients reports of their progress to improve services.
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he paper entitled ‘Direct access to chiropractic services versus NHS physician referral: Analysis of a large data set from the UK’ described the results from 8222 patients attending Back2Health with back or neck pain. 41% had been referred by their GP on the NHS with the rest attending privately.
The NHS referred patients were more likely to have long standing spinal pain and other illnesses such as diabetes, depression or fibromyalgia. However once adjusted for these factors it was found that there was no difference between the groups in their improvement in symptoms. This demonstrates that chiropractic care provided by Back2Health is a good service for NHS patients.
Jonathan reported that over 99% of patients were happy with their care and most of these said their expectations had been exceeded.
Back2Health has been actively engaged in research into helping people with spinal pain for many years and it was particularly pleasing when the paper was recognised with the award for best clinic based research.