Systematic reviews of literature relevant to early intervention and early childhood services are important to the practice of occupational therapy. We describe the five questions that served as the focus for the systematic reviews of the effectiveness of occupational therapy interventions in early intervention and early childhood services. We include the background for the reviews; the process ...

Men who are raising dependent children after their spouses or partners have died from cancer face unique challenges adjusting to single parenthood while managing their grief and the grief of their children. Unfortunately, the needs of those widowers have been overlooked in the clinical literature and no published interventions are designed specifically for that population. The current article d...

Adults with cancer may be at risk for limitations in functional status and quality of life (QOL). Occupational therapy is a supportive service with the specific mission to help people functionally engage in life as safely and independently as possible with the primary goal of improving QOL. Unfortunately, for people with cancer, occupational therapy remains underused. The overall purpose of thi...

Parkinson's disease is a chronic and increasingly complex condition, demanding multidisciplinary management. Over the last twenty years or so, alongside the growth of specialist services and healthcare teams specifically developed for people with Parkinson's, occupational therapy has grown in recognition as a treatment option, especially since evidence of its efficacy is now slowly emerging. Th...

Given the current health care debate, it is imperative to document the usefulness of various health services for older persons, a rapidly growing population at increased risk for a wide variety of physical and functional impairments. A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the degree of effectiveness of occupational therapy for older persons. For a sample of 15 distinct tests of occupational t...

Focus groups were conducted with caregivers from eight racial-specific or ethnic-specific populations (African Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, Hispanics, Koreans, Native Americans, Russians, and Vietnamese), to examine cultural variations in caregiving experiences, care-related values and beliefs, care practices, and factors contributing to decisions about the use of caregiver support services. ...

This paper presents a new synthesis of the coping literature, the Appraisal Model of Coping. It is based largely on the theoretical concepts of the cognitive relational theory of coping and emotion (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, 1987) and social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1977). The model provides a conceptual template to guide occupational therapy intervention with respect to assisting patients to ...

I n the present issue of the European Respiratory Review, JOLLEY and MOXHAM [1] present ‘‘A physiological model of patient-reported breathlessness during daily activities in COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]’’. The purpose of their interesting approach is to explain why a given patient may experience breathlessness in some particular situations of his/her daily life, based on the var...

The process of treatment planning requires the effective application of complex problem-solving skills. The occupational therapy literature has described components of this process and has identified both the difficulty educators have in teaching and the difficulty clinicians have in articulating the process of clinical problem solving. This paper presents a conceptual model of the dynamic proc...

Context: All-hazards. Global applications of evidence-based guidance for disaster behavioral health support in disasters. This Commentary introduces trauma signature (TSIG) analysis as an evidence-based method that examines the interrelationship between population exposure to a disaster, extreme event, or complex emergency; and the interrelated physical and psychological consequences; for the p...