Advancing Patient and Community Engagement in Occupational Therapy Research

Abstract

Occupational therapy research has a long and varied history of involving patients, public, and communities in research as advisors, collaborators, and co-researchers. In Canada, funding agencies have expected patients and knowledge users to be research team members for more than a decade, as illustrated in initiatives like the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (CIHR, 2019). However, the extent to which researchers engage with patient or community partners and the quality of engagement varies. The three of us writing this editorial (one patient researcher and two academic researchers) bring our own experiences with research teams to discuss why patient and community engagement in research matters. We advocate for wider inclusion of patient and community collaborators in research teams, integrating an explicit description of this engagement in the methods section of research reports, and appropriate recognition of contributions from patient and community collaborators, including authorship.

Elizabeth Casson Memorial Lecture 2022: Optimising performance, clinical and economic outcomes in occupational therapy service delivery

“…de longh et al (2021) and Backman et al (2022) advocate the importance of having patient and public involvement in the whole research process Therefore, the collaboration between managers, clinicians, researchers, health economists, policymakers and other stakeholders, with patient and public involvement, is important to highlight the needs, obtain funding and implement research to identify factors and mechanisms which contribute to the success in achieving these three outcomes in the real-world environment.…”

Development of a goal setting and goal management system: Intervention Mapping

“…In rehabilitation, especially in occupational therapy (OT), there have been challenges in establishing ecologically valid evidence-based interventions. This is due to inadequate identification and description of intervention components and mechanisms, as well as insufficient consideration of the preferences and needs of target clients and practitioners ( 22 – 25 ).…”

Public and professional involvement in a systematic review investigating the impact of occupational therapy on the self-management of rheumatoid arthritis

“…Although research evaluating the methods and benefits of PPI in research exists (Domecq et al, 2014; Greenhalgh et al, 2019; Wilson et al, 2015), there are fewer examples of reporting and/or evaluating this in systematic reviews in occupational therapy (Backman et al, 2022; Williamson et al, 2023). One such example is a recent scoping review by Røssvoll et al (2022) exploring how PPI has been conducted and evaluated in occupational therapy research.…”