A new study from University of Missouri researchers has found that checking in on patients' social and mental health needs prior to orthopedic surgery makes a successful recovery much more likely.
Kylee Rucinski, an assistant research professor of orthopaedic surgery at the MU School of Medicine, is one of the co-authors of the study.
She said they wanted to explore the reasons for non-adherence after surgery – essentially why patients fail to follow through on their treatment plans.
“We started seeing some failures, which was frustrating, because they were great patients,” Rucinski said. “And that's when we realized it was patients who weren't following through on their protocol, not because they were, you know, trying to do something wrong. It was typically because they either didn't understand or they didn't have the resources to be able to do it effectively.”
She said that recovery from an orthopedic surgery is often a long process with many restrictions on movement and activity, and not following a treatment plan can make a surgery more likely to fail.
Rucinski said in the study they had patients meet with a health behavior psychologist prior to surgery to discuss possible challenges to recovery, such as financial burdens, inability to take time off work and mental health concerns.
“Many times we look at patients and we just see a broken leg, but we don't realize that there's a whole person there," Rucinski said. "So, if we can figure out the social things going on, we can really help them get a better outcome.”
She said some of the most common barriers they found were mental health issues and jobs that made movement restrictions difficult to navigate.
The study found that only seven of the nearly 100 patients who underwent counseling with the health behavior psychologist needed surgery again – in part because they did a better job sticking to their treatment plans.
But, Rucinski said, while the results of the study were promising, it could be hard for other institutions to replicate as there are not a large number of health psychologists in the industry.
“So, we do need to figure out ways that we can help patients who have an orthopedic trauma injury and patients when we don't have a health psychologist available to see them.”
