Identifying occupational therapists' referral priorities in community health

Regression versus fast and frugal models of decision-making: the case of prescribing for depression

“…Wigton, 1996;Harries, Evans, Dennis, & Dean, 1996;Dhami & Harries, 2001;Smith, Gilhooly, & Walker, 2003), law (Dhami & Ayton, 2001;Dhami, 2003) and occupational therapy (Harries & Gilhooly, 2003a, 2003b has been analysed extensively in recent years. Typically, participants are asked to make decisions on a set of cases, real or hypothetical, which consist of a combination of cues (pieces of information) and until recently regression models were generally applied to infer which cues were being used and how the cues were weighted in an assumed linear integration process (Cooksey, 1996).…”

Teaching young dogs new tricks: improving occupational therapists' referral prioritization capacity with a web-based decision-training aid

“…How experienced occupational therapists use these factors to judge referral priority was researched so that best practice can be shared: 40 members of the COT Specialist Section for Mental Health made referral prioritization decisions on 90 referrals so that, using regression analysis, the use of referral information to make such judgements could be examined (2). The weighting given to the referral information was termed the weighting or judgement policy.…”

“…A consensus standard based on the experts' optimal referral prioritization policies was produced: to identify experienced therapists' prioritization policies (2), to examine the capacity for self-insight into these policies (3), to distinguish factors that affect policy use (4). The consensus standard policy for undertaking the task of referral prioritization was developed (2,4). Expert practitioners were found to have used three key cues in their prioritisation policies: reason for referral (b = 0.69), diagnosis (b = 0.48), and a history of violence (b = 0.12).…”

Understanding and supporting occupational therapists clinical decision-making for the management of upper limb post stoke sensory impairment

“…Limited availability of research also contributes to therapists' uncertainty in deciding on the management of upper limb impairments (Kuipers & McKenna, 2009). There is some research investigating how occupational therapists make and manage clinical decisions in practice, including for example, areas such as referrals in community mental health (Harries & Gilhooly, 2003); management of upper limb hyper tonicity in children and adolescents with cerebral palsy (Rassafiani, Ziviani, Rodger, & Dalgleish, 2008); and management of upper limb performance dysfunction following brain injury (Kuipers, McKenna, & Carlson, 2006). Rassafiani et al (2008) argues that information obtained from studies of CDM with one client group cannot be generalised to another client group as expertise is domain specific.…”

“…CDM including: studies of factors influencing whether or not to accept referrals in community mental health (Harries & Gilhooly, 2003) The nature of the decision task such as its familiarity, certainty, level of risk, stability and congruence (Shanteau, 1992;, as well as the personal attributes and expertise of the decision maker and the context also impact the reasoning processes (Harries & Harries, 2001;, Smith Higgs & Ellis, 2007. suggest that in order to improve CDM skills clinicians need to be aware of the multiple factors contributing to their CDM, whether content-based or contextual.…”