Development of an Individualized Occupational Therapy Programme and its Effects on the Neurocognition, Symptoms and Social Functioning of Patients with Schizophrenia

Abstract

We described an individualized occupational therapy (IOT) programme and examined the effects of adding IOT to group OT (GOT) on improving neurocognition, symptoms and social functioning among recently hospitalized patients with schizophrenia. The Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia-Japanese version (BACS-J), the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and the Global Assessment of Functioning scale were used for outcome evaluations. Fifty-one patients were voluntarily assigned to either the GOT + IOT (n = 30) or GOT alone (n = 21) groups based on their preferences. Retention in the GOT + IOT group was 100%. Three-month baseline to discharge assessments in the GOT + IOT group showed significant improvements in BACS-J verbal memory, working memory, verbal fluency, attention, executive function and composite score, and in PANSS positive subscale, general psychopathology subscale, and total score compared to the GOT alone group. Study limitations notwithstanding, the present findings provide preliminary support for the feasibility of implementing IOT and its effectiveness for improving cognitive impairment and symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. The results of this study indicate that IOT in psychiatric facilities may improve psychosocial treatment of schizophrenia. Additional study is warranted to replicate the effects of IOT as demonstrated in this Japanese study. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effect of adding individualized occupational therapy to standard care on rehospitalization of patients with schizophrenia: A 2‐year prospective cohort study

“…The OT intervention methods administered to the participants were reported in our previous studies; we only describe the primary features here. A comparison of features between IOT and GOT is shown in Table .…”

“…Takeshi Shimada, OTR, PhD, 1,2 Manami Ohori, OTR, 3 Yusuke Inagaki, OTR, 4 Yuko Shimooka, OTR, 5 Ikuyo Ishihara, OTR, 6 Naoya Sugimura, OTR, MHS, 7 Sachie Tanaka, OTR, PhD 1 and Masayoshi Kobayashi, OTR, PhD 1 * Aim: We examined the effect of individualized occupational therapy (IOT) compared to the usual group occupational therapy (GOT) on the rehospitalization of patients with schizophrenia.…”

Cost-Effectiveness of Individualized Occupational Therapy for Schizophrenia: Results from a Two-Year Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Findings of these studies demonstrated that adding IOT to GOT resulted in significant improvements in cognition and intrinsic motivation [2] and could prolong the time to rehospitalization and reduce the risk of rehospitalization in comparison to GOT alone, in addition to supporting good cognition at discharge and favorable medication adherence [3]. Details of the IOT study have been published [1][2][3].…”

“…The OT intervention methods have been reported elsewhere [1][2][3]. We only describe the main features here.…”

“…The individualized occupational therapy (IOT) program was developed to facilitate proactive participation in treatment and improve outcomes for patients with schizophrenia [1][2][3]. To evaluate the effect of adding IOT to group occupational therapy (GOT) as standard care, we conducted a multicenter, single-blind, randomized controlled trial, in which we assessed cognition using the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia (BACS) [4,5] and the Schizophrenia Cognition Rating Scale (SCoRS) [6,7], intrinsic motivation using the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) [8], social…”