The Importance of Occupational Therapy Contributions to Health Services Research

Abstract

Health care delivery includes a backdrop of constrained resources and scrutiny of quality, benefits, and cost of services. The peer-reviewed evidence supporting the benefits of occupational therapy is therefore of considerable importance in the debate about what constitutes reimbursable therapies. This article identifies the scope of occupational therapy research articles in recent published literature. MEDLINE and CINAHL were searched for "occupational therapy" from January 1996 through October 2002. Articles were coded by content, journal, and country. Journal ratings for "impact" also were reviewed. A total of 3,391 articles met inclusion criteria and 868 (25.6%) were classified as research, among which more than half (55.0%) were published in occupational therapy journals. Within occupational therapy journals, 21.4% of scholarship identified as occupational therapy was classified as research compared to 42.9% of the articles in rehabilitation medicine journals. Occupational therapy scholarship is in danger of being omitted in the current debates on health care delivery, costs, and quality. More transdisciplinary research may be one avenue for expanding occupational therapy research.

Caracterização de publicações científicas sobre terapia ocupacional em periódicos não específicos da profissão no período de 2004 a 2015

“…Non-specific occupational therapy journals represent the possibility of an interdisciplinary dialogue between occupational therapy and related areas and an increase in the visibility of the profession, favoring its strengthening and scientific and social recognition (POTTER, 2010;ANDRESEN;TANG;BARNEY, 2006;JOHNSON;LEISING, 1986). However, less than 1/3 (n = 70) of the non-specific occupational therapy journals listed in Webqualis strata A1 and A2 of area 21 of CAPES published at least one article related to the profession.…”

“…The identification of the increase production of knowledge of occupational therapy indicates that these journals have been increasingly considered important vehicles of knowledge dissemination of the profession and to the fact that other researchers have recently analyzed them to identify the scientific publication of the field (BROWN et al, 2018(BROWN et al, , 2017ANDRESEN;TANG;BARNEY, 2006).…”

“…Initially, the titles, abstracts, and keywords were analyzed according to the inclusion criteria presented above, according to previous studies (BROWN et al, 2018(BROWN et al, , 2017ANDRESEN;TANG;BARNEY, 2006). Then, a script was created for extracting the data in a Microsoft Excel® Program spreadsheet to obtain the following information: authorship, type of article, country and institution of origin, study objective, design, research approach, population studied and age group.…”

Is There Enough Evidence for Evidence-Based Practice in Occupational Therapy?

“…We classified the reviewed articles on the basis of Holm's (2000) (2005) of the American Journal of Occupational Therapy (AJOT).We chose AJOT to replicate Ottenbacher and Petersen (1985) because AJOT has the most highly rated impactfactorofallpeer-reviewedoccupa-tionaltherapyjournalsthatcanbeaccessed in electronic databases (Andresen et al, 2006).Wedidnotincludeintheanalysis several feature departments appearing in thejournal.Theexcludedarticlesincluded NationallySpeaking,TheStudentSpeaks, The Issue Is, editorials, book reviews, memorials,andofficialreportsorposition papers from association departments or taskforces.…”

“…Many research articles that provide evidence for occupational therapy practice maybepublishedinmedical,educational, psychological, and other social sciences journals. According to Andresen et al (2006), rehabilitation medicine journals published more research articles involving occupationaltherapythandidoccupational therapyjournals.…”