Unpaid caregivers are often expected to help family members or friends overcome activity limitations and participation restrictions to successfully age in place. Caregivers assume multiple responsibilities, such as managing their own physical and psychosocial needs and navigating a complex health care system, and many feel ill equipped to fulfill the necessary health care responsibilities for their care recipients. Underprepared caregivers may cause poor outcomes for care recipients. Federal and state policy proposals call attention to the need to better support caregivers, especially as their numbers increase. Occupational therapy practitioners are well positioned to effectively engage caregivers as they navigate the health care system. The occupational therapy process looks broadly at the functional abilities, environmental contexts, and occupational demands that play a pivotal role in successful aging in place for clients and better outcomes for their caregivers. Now is the time to define occupational therapy’s distinct value to this area.

Evidence Connection articles provide clinical application of systematic reviews developed in conjunction with the American Occupational Therapy Association’s (AOTA’s) Evidence-Based Practice Project. In this Evidence Connection article, we describe a case report of an older adult who was referred to outpatient occupational therapy services due to chronic back pain from herniated discs. Findings from the systematic review of occupational therapy for community-dwelling older adults were published in the July/August 2018 issue of the American Journal of Occupational Therapy ( Berger et al., 2018 ; Elliott & Leland, 2018 ; Hunter & Kearney, 2018 ; Liu et al., 2018 ; Smallfield & Lucas Molitor, 2018a , 2018b ) and in the American Occupational Therapy Association’s Occupational Therapy Practice Guidelines for Productive Aging for Community-Dwelling Older Adults. Each article in the Evidence Connection series summarizes the evidence from the published reviews on a given topic and presents an application of the evidence to a related clinical case. These articles illustrate how the research evidence from the reviews can be used to inform and guide clinical decision making.

The American Occupational Therapy Association’s Centennial Vision articulates the need for occupational therapy to be science driven and evidence based in major practice areas. This article provides a review on the state of the occupational therapy research published in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy (AJOT) in the area of productive aging in the past 2 years (2008–2009). The article identifies the types of research published, assesses how well the journal is meeting the Centennial Vision in productive aging research, and discusses implications for utilization of the evidence by occupational therapy practitioners. Although many basic research articles provide a foundation for future intervention development and further define practice roles, the AJOT articles addressing productive aging represent diverse research questions and have produced a body of knowledge that is not easily translated to practice. More effectiveness studies are needed to provide adequate evidence for occupational therapy intervention with older adults.