About “Estimating clinically important change in gait speed in people with stroke undergoing outpatient rehabilitation.”

Discussion. Thus, a “real” value (vs. an estimate) of a clinically meaningful change is likely between 0.15 and 0.20 m/s in the outpatient stroke population. George’s answer: Gait speed is one of the most commonly used outcome measures of walking ability in people with stroke, both in clinical practice and in research studies. Because it is so widely used we wanted to identify how much change in gait speed is important to people with stroke that are undergoing out patient rehabilitation. Based on the results, we estimated that a change of approximately 0.175 m/s reflects an important change in walking ability to people with stroke. We believe that these results can be very useful in clinical practice. Physical therapists can use these findings to help them assess patient improvement in walking ability and to determine the effectiveness of their interventions. Patients whose improvement in gait speed does not exceed 0.175 m/s over a period of time may lead the physical therapist to modify the plan of care or to discharge the patient from physical therapy services. This important change value could also be used to justify continued physical therapy services to third party payers. If the patient’s walking ability continues to improve as indicated by a change in gait speed greater than 0.175 m/s this might be a good indication that the patient has not plateaued and may benefit from continued rehabilitation services. An important aspect of this research to note is that...
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