Issues

This Health Policy Perspectives column examines how consumerism influences health care policy, in particular occupational therapy service delivery.

This article identifies the common assessment tools utilized by pediatric occupational therapists and brings awareness to the inconsistent identification and integration of occupation-based assessment tools within pediatric clinical practice.

How people perceived their condition following a stroke dictated their levels of activity engagement in their community of residence. The findings suggest that understanding clients’ illness perceptions may assist occupational therapy practitioners in developing comprehensive, targeted interventions to improve activity engagement and maximize recovery.

Although positive attitudes and self-efficacy are key to evidence-based practices (EBPs), how one becomes an evidence-based practitioner, and how expertise in EBP manifests in practice, remains unclear. This article describes how expert evidence-based occupational therapists develop their expertise.

This study highlights the importance of a holistic approach in occupational therapy for patients with distal radius fractures (DRF) and reveals that standard measurements might overlook key challenges that they face. By adopting broader evaluative methods, occupational therapists can better address patient-specific needs and enhance their rehabilitation outcomes.

This systematic review evaluates the clinical utility and psychometric properties of handwriting assessments, which could be used to identify and evaluate specific learning disorders (e.g., dysgraphia) if an early referral to occupational therapy is carried out.

This article highlights evidence demonstrating the validity and precision of the revised American Occupational Therapy Association’s Fieldwork Performance Evaluation items and supports academic and fieldwork settings for occupational therapy students and occupational therapy assistant students.

This study found that a combination of origami and copying activities had the strongest associations with children’s visual–motor integration (VMI). Teachers and clinicians can use these two activities when addressing VMI development among preschool children.

As an occupation-based intervention, the Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) protocol can improve hand performance, ability to perform daily activities, and quality of life in people with burn injuries.

This study found that early assessment of activities of daily living (ADLs) in routine care of hospitalized patients may aid in treatment and care plan decisions, particularly for inpatients who may be at higher risk for adverse outcomes.

The results of this study will allow occupational therapists to establish differences between patients’ functionality in comparison with healthy individuals and to design recovery treatments and facilitate performance of manual tasks, considering which are the most advantageous positions to exert force. The developed device can also be used to monitor the evolution of these torques in an objective and reliable manner.

This multisite quality improvement (QI) initiative shows that outpatient occupational therapy practitioners can implement parent coaching as a best practice with the use of a toolkit. Results suggest that education alone does not result in changes to practitioner behavior and that QI methods can help when implementing best practices in a clinical setting.

This scoping review identifies meanings of occupation linked to the health and well-being of adults with advanced cancer to develop and improve occupation-based services in oncology.

The Test of Visual Perceptual Skills–Fourth Edition (TVPS–4), which utilizes seven subscales, showed three sound validities (ecological, convergent, and discriminative) for comprehensively assessing visual perception in people with schizophrenia.

The study results offer initial psychometric data for a new remote measurement device for maximal grip strength (MGS). Reliable MGS measurements are vital for occupational therapists to guide treatment interventions and to assess the impact of hand function on the daily activities of aging adults.

This study highlights the need for further research that addresses effective sensory-based occupational therapy interventions for adolescents and adults. It also captures which components of intervention clients deemed helpful and identifies potential targets for future intervention.

Adolescents described several approaches parents used to help them to learn to manage tasks, which may provide direction for occupational therapy clinicians working with youth who are transitioning to adulthood.

The data provided in this study can inform resource allocation, workforce development, and entry-level occupational therapy education to address the ongoing needs of older adults with visual impairment, which limits meaningful participation in daily living.

This Issue Is column discusses holistic admission best practices and shares diversity outcomes that have resulted from enacting these practices within the occupational therapy education program at the University of Southern California’s Mrs. T. H. Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.

This column identifies how occupational therapists are equipped to play a key role in moving health care practices away from a reactive model of care to a proactive one to support adult obesity prevention and presents intervention examples.

These Practice Guidelines provide a summary of strong and moderate evidence for effective interventions for adults with stroke and for their caregivers.