Occupational therapy in Australian residential aged care facilities: A systematic mapping review

Abstract

Introduction: Australia's population is ageing, resulting in more older adults living in residential aged care facilities. Occupational therapy scope of practice in Australian residential aged care facilities is significantly influenced by the government funding instrument. As the current government funding instrument is administratively inefficient, insufficiently discriminates between residents' care needs and provides perverse incentives, a new funding model is set to be implemented. This creates an opportunity for a review of the current evidence base to support the lobbying of national associations to shape occupational therapy practice. The research question that guided this systematic mapping review was as follows: What is the current state of scholarship about occupational therapy in Australian residential aged care facilities? Methods: A search of four databases (CINAHL, Medline, Embase and Scopus) was conducted and 1,617 papers were identified. All papers were screened through a two-phase process: (i) title and abstract review and (ii) full text review, using pre-determined inclusion and exclusion criteria to identify papers relevant to this review. A data extraction tool was designed in Microsoft Excel ® and was used to extract data from the included papers.Results: Twelve Australian articles were published between 1986 and 2020, most frequently authored by an occupational therapist. Included articles were classified into four groups: articles including occupational therapists as participants, articles about occupational therapy practice, articles exploring an occupational perspective of residents and articles with limited exploration of occupational therapy. Conclusion: This review identified that there is a dearth of Australian occupational therapy literature. This creates challenges for occupational therapists seeking evidence to guide their practice to optimise resident health and wellbeing and for national associations seeking to lobby for the profession. Consequently, there is a crucial need to develop the evidence base to support the profession within this practice setting and, ultimately, residents.

Potential of virtual reality to meaningfully engage adults living with dementia in care settings: A scoping review

“…However, D'Cunha et al (2021) highlighted the importance of careful planning and implementation by skilled facilitators as their control group (without VR but run as an exercise group facilitated by an occupational therapist) and experimental group (with VR) had similar outcomes, indicating that the use of VR alone does not facilitate deeper levels of engagement. For this reason, occupational therapists, with their expertise in fostering meaningful engagement, should be consulted in the planning, implementation and evaluation of VR programmes in RACHs for older adults living with dementia (Calderone et al, 2022; du Toit et al, 2019).…”

Addressing Gender-Based Violence in Drug Addiction Treatment: a Systematic Mapping Review

“…Here, we present a systematic mapping review, in which we first pinpoint any gaps in our knowledge and then take a critical look at the research carried out over the last 10 years from a feminist perspective. We also include a visual synthesis of the data, focusing on questions rather than topics, following the guidelines of a systematic mapping review (Akçayır et al, 2022;Calderone et al, 2022).…”

Characteristics of Occupational Therapy Interventions to Promote Healthy Aging: Protocol for a Scoping Review

“…Nonetheless, the population of older adults has been variously defined as 60 years old [ 13 ], over 65 years of age or older [ 9 ], or 80 years of age or older [ 12 ]. Interventions have targeted people living in nursing homes [ 16 ], Australian residential aged care facilities [ 17 ], and community-dwelling older people [ 10 , 17 , 18 ]. The focus has tended to be on secondary prevention, within the context of disease management, rather than primary prevention with community-dwelling adults [ 10 ].…”

“…While the reviews identified had a bearing on the topic, most were not specifically about the topic. A total of 7 of the 11 reviews were about discrete topics, that is, older adults’ occupations in heatwaves [ 21 ], joy among older people [ 22 ], quality of life [ 16 , 23 ], e-tools for transportation planning [ 24 ], occupational therapy in residential aged care [ 17 ], and instruments to support occupational therapy practice [ 9 ]. A review by Kim et al [ 18 ] focused on daily functioning and included occupational therapy, but its focus was on activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living rather than the broader concept of healthy aging.…”