Table 5 Feasibility criteria
| Â | A priori feasibility criteria | Feasibility threshold met? | Considerations for future trial |
|---|---|---|---|
Recruitment strategies feasibility | Journals agreeing to publish the recruitment ad for free (a) | Both professional journals accepted | It is not possible to provide an accurate recruitment rate as some of the advertising media contacted osteopaths indirectly and so the denominator is unknown. |
Regional groups accepting to forward messages to their members | All regional groups accepted | ||
National Council for Osteopathic Research (NCOR) accepting to inform their members about the research project (a) | NCOR informed their members and mentioned the study when doing talks to regional groups | ||
Ads published on time (a) | Journal ads were published on time for readers to have time to contact the PI if interested to have more information | ||
Gaining access to GOsC members’ email addresses who accepted to be contacted for research purpose (a) | Access to 1000 email addresses was granted by the PI’s institution | ||
Mail Merge system allowing to do mass emailing (a) | 1000 emails were sent with no issue with the system | ||
Recruitment and retention feasibility | Recruiting 50 participants (a) | Only 45 were recruited. As only 43 met the eligibility criteria, two with 14 years in practice were included. | • Reassess eligibility criteria owing to their strictness • Consider recruiting other Allied Health Practitioners with similar scope of practice • Consider having a longer recruitment period (12 prospects contacted the PI within the following 4 months). |
Enough participants accepting to be interviewed to reach data saturation (b) | 10 participants agreed to be interviewed, 9 were needed to reach data saturation. | Â | |
Participants sending back consent forms (a, b) | Consent forms were received from all participants | Â | |
Reaching an 80% retention rate (a, b) | 91% (41/45) for the Quant strand, and 90% for Qual strand (9/10) | High retention rate achieved by sending reminders to participants: up to seven reminders per participant when not accessing the e-learning | |
Data collection feasibility | Receiving questionnaires back from participants (a) | Post-intervention questionnaires were completed by 43 participants (96%): 2 participants in intervention group did not complete the course (details in text below) nor questionnaires despite invitation. All control group participants completed the questionnaires | Â |
To send questionnaires in a format easy to access and fill in by all participants (a) | Questionnaires sent in Word© were protected to ensure participants could not change the content of the questionnaires. This led to compatibility problems. | Alternative systems should be considered. | |
Using voice-over-IP service successfully (b) | Yes | Â | |
Being able to record the interviews (b) | One recording was faulty. Field notes were used to write up a transcript that the interviewee checked within three hours of the interview. No excerpts were used from this interview. | Â | |
Interview guide suitable (b) | Provided useful content and was well accepted by participants | Â | |
Participants agreeing to fill in questionnaires (a) | Participants accepted the questionnaires well. Some were surprised about the similarities of the questions across the two validated measures included. | Consider using only one of the two attitudinal questionnaires. | |
Control group accepting to fill in questionnaires twice before taking the course, 6 weeks apart (a) | All sent back the completed questionnaires | Â | |
Suitability of the reflexive iterative process of data management (b) | The process was feasible and satisfactory and was well accepted. | Â | |
Acceptability and feasibility of the outcome measures | Suitability of attitudinal questionnaires (a) | Some participants expressed their surprise about the similarities of the questions across the two validated measures included | Â |
Threshold met | Threshold partly met | Threshold not met | Â |