Occupational Therapy PSP Question Verification Form

The purpose of this Question Verification Form is to enable Priority Setting Partnerships (PSPs) to describe clearly how they checked that their questions were unanswered, before starting the interim prioritisation stage of the process.

The JLA requires PSPs to be transparent and accountable in defining their own scope and evidence checking process. This will enable researchers and other stakeholders to understand how individual PSPs decided that their questions were unanswered, and any limitations of their evidence checking.

Name of the PSP

Occupational Therapy

Please describe the scope of the PSP

The scope of the project reflects the scope of occupational therapy practice. The RCOT Scope of Occupational Therapy Practice Briefing, published in 2019, states that ‘any activity that an occupational therapist uses or does therapeutically, in order to enable or enhance occupational performance, may be considered within the professional scope of practice’. (RCOT, 2019). The scope of the occupational therapy PSP encompasses:

• perspectives gathered from the four nations of the UK;
• perspectives reflective of the range of practice-based roles contributing to the delivery of occupational therapy services, such as HCPC registered occupational therapists, their assistants, support workers, anyone delivering occupational therapy interventions, occupational therapy students and others working in the health and social care environment;
• occupational therapy practice based within statutory services as well as the private, voluntaryand independent sectors;
• physical and mental health and the areas of overlap between them;
• the needs and perspectives of people using occupational therapy services across the full spectrum of age ranges from childhood to end of life, including those at key transition periods in various stages of life; and
• perspectives of people with lived experience of accessing occupational therapy services and their carers about the services, information, assessments, interventions and outcomes provided by those services.

Please provide a brief overview of your approach to checking whether the questions were unanswered

For reasons of practicality, a federated search was applied. This is a keyword / free text only search that excludes the use of thesaurus terms. Highly focused and targeted searches were conducted rather than a full systematic approach (which would have been impractical within the timeframe of the PSP).

Please list the type(s) of evidence you used to verify your questions as unanswered

The evidence used to verify the questions are unanswered were as follows:

• Peer-reviewed papers
• High quality evidence sources
• Guidelines
• Grey literature
• Unpublished, in progress registered trials

Please list the sources that you searched in order to identify that evidence

The EBSCO interface was used to search the following health and medical bibliographic databases:

• Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL)
• Allied and Complementary Medicine Database (AMED)
• Medline

Other resources included in the search were as follows:

• The Cochrane Library
• Epistemonikos
• TRIP Database
• Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN)
• NHS Evidence
• Google Scholar
• Royal College of Occupational Therapists

What search terms did you use?

Groups of the following sets were combined depending on the type of question:

Set 1 (Used for questions about effectiveness. Not used for questions such as: What is the role of OT in….?
What are the barriers to accessing occupational therapy services? What do patients value most about OT services? Questions that were likely to be answered via qualitative literature)

RCT or “randomi?ed control* trial” or “control* clinical trial*” or quasi-experiment or “double blind” or “single blind” or “pretest posttest” or trial or “crossover design” or “crossover study” or “comparative design” or “cluster study” or “cluster design” or “systematic review” or “meta analys*” or “meta-analys*” or metaanaly* or “meta synthes*” or meta-synthes*

Set 2 (Used for questions about value and/or impact)

benefit* or value or impact or effect*

Set 3 (Used always)

“occupational therap* or “occupational science” (in document titles, abstracts or source title)

Set 4 (Used always - words to reflect the concepts or focus in the questions – searched in document titles and abstracts), e.g.

“moving and handling” or “manual handling” or “patient handling

“acute services” or “acute settings”

Overweight or obese or bariatric or “plus size*” or “plus-size*”

Please describe the parameters of the search (eg time limits, excluded sources, country/language) and the rationale for any limitations

Eligibility criteria used for the inclusion of evidence was as follows:

• To ensure retrieval of the most recent and credible literature, searches were restricted to the last 5 years (2014 onwards).
• The exception to the above rule was where Cochrane Reviews originally published earlier than 2014 had recently been updated
• Conference presentations were excluded from the results
• Papers addressing the question but without an OT context or focus were excluded

Because the evidence base in many areas of occupational therapy is underdeveloped, weak or varied in nature selection was broadly inclusive of all evidence types. Evidence of both high and low quality was included to demonstrate an overall picture and to justify why most questions were verified as uncertainties or found to have been partially addressed.

Names of individuals who undertook the evidence checking

Dr Hannah Spring

On what date was the question verification process completed?

9th February 2020

Any other relevant information

None