rehabilitation experiences of people with cerebral palsy: a literature review

introduction: cerebral palsy (cp) is anon-progressive abnormality of the developing brain that requires extensive and long-term rehabilitation. accordingly, people with cp may gainextensive experience of rehabilitation throughout their lives. understandingthese experiences wouldimprove the attitudes of rehabilitation service providers toward this group of patients. materials and methods: google scholar, pubmed, medline, eric, psychinfo, ovid, cochrane library, cinahl, web of knowledge, pedro, otseeker, rehabdata, rehadat, sid, iranmedex, noormags, medlib, magiran and irandoc databases were searched for related qualitative and quantitative studies published from1980 to 2012. finally, 15 articles including 13 qualitative and 2survey studies were found. results: the two main extracted themes were “perceived experiences of treatment” and “experiences of treatment effects”. the former subthemes include physical and psychological feelings from treatment, treatment environment and used equipment, enjoyment, motivation, meaningfulness of and goal-directedtreatment, safety, client-centered treatment, usual and unusual treatments, role of other in treatment experience, and treatment systems. the latter subthemesinclude physical outcomes, psychological outcomes, and the effects of treatment on different aspects of life. conclusion: to gain cp patients’ satisfaction and to provide them withsatisfactory benefitsofservices, perceived experiences of treatment and experiences of treatment effects should be considered. more research on experiences with different treatments for people with cp is required.