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Opportunities and challenges around adapting supported employment interventions for people with chronic low back pain: modified nominal group technique

Abstract Purpose To identify and rank opportunities and challenges around adapting supported employment interventions for people with chronic low back pain (LBP). Methods Delegates from an international back and neck research forum were invited to join an expert panel. A modified nominal group technique (NGT) was used with four stages: silent generation, round robin, clarification, and ranking. Ranked items were reported back and ratified by the panel. Results Nine experienced researchers working in the fields related to LBP and disability joined the panel. Forty-eight items were generated and grouped into 12 categories of opportunities/challenges. Categories ranked most important related respectively to policy and legislation, ensuring operational integration across different systems, funding interventions, and managing attitudes towards work and health, workplace flexibility, availability of “good” work for this client group, dissonance between client and system aims, timing of interventions, and intervention development. Conclusions An expert panel believes the most important opportunities/challenges around adapting supporting employment interventions for people with chronic LBP are facilitating integration/communication between systems and institutions providing intervention components, optimising research outputs for informing policy needs, and encouraging discussion around funding mechanisms for research and interventions. Addressing these factors may help improve the quality and impact of future interventions. Implications for rehabilitation Interaction pathways between health, employment, and social systems need to be improved to effectively deliver intervention components that necessarily span these systems. Research-policy communication needs to be improved by researchers and policy makers, so that research outputs can be consumed by policy makers, and so that researchers recognise the gaps in knowledge needed to underpin policy. Improvements in research-policy communication and coordination would facilitate the delivery of research output at a time when it is likely to make the most impact on policy-making. Discussion and clarification surrounding funding mechanisms for research and interventions may facilitate innovation generally.