Motivators for Volunteerism in Doctor of Physical Therapy Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic

A National Survey

Abstract

Introduction: Physical therapy programs are increasingly utilizing pro bono clinics as an element of education. Obtaining an understanding of what motivates students of physical therapy (SPT) to volunteer is important as pro bono clinics serve the under-insured in the community. The Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI) explores the motives behind volunteerism and has not yet been used to analyze the SPT population. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate motivational factors involved in SPT participation in their pro-bono clinics.

Methods: All 261 accredited physical therapy programs in the United States were contacted and asked to distribute the survey to their students.  Upon agreement, the anonymous survey link was sent to the representative to be dispersed to the students via email. Qualtrics Survey Software® was used to collect the data. Descriptive statistics, independent t-test, and logistic regression were used to analyze the data. SPSS v26 was used. The alpha level was set to p <0.05.

Results: The survey had 274 SPT participants in this study. The participants were split into participation (n=189) and non- participation (n=85) groups. Pro bono clinics made changes in response to the coronavirus-disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic by temporarily pausing treatment (56.2%), changing from in person to telehealth on a video platform (44.9%) or telehealth on a phone call (9.5%).

Conclusions: Similar to previous studies on volunteer motivators in medical students, those who volunteered were significantly more motivated by their values including altruistic and humanitarian concerns compared to those who did not volunteer (p<0.05). This small cross-sectional study found that SPT were more motivated to volunteer based on their altruistic concern. Over half of the SPT respondents reported changing pro bono services or pausing services due to the COVID-19 pandemic.