Background  Occupation-focused and occupation-based interventions can potentially promote occupational engagement among community-dwelling older people, but there is limited evidence to identify the most effective and cost-effective interventions. For independent-living older people, there is a lack of evidence to determine if occupation-focused and occupation-based interventions have an effect on their occupational engagement. For older people who need assistance because of bathing disabilities, there is limited evidence of the effects of occupation-focused and occupation-based interventions on their occupational engagement or for reducing or omitting their need for assistance. Finally, there is limited evidence to determine if occupation-focused and occupation-based interventions implemented for community-dwelling older people are cost effective. Aim The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the effects and cost effectiveness of occupation-focused and occupation-based interventions for two groups of community-dwelling older people, independent-living, community-dwelling older people and older people with bathing disabilities. Method Studies I and II were based on an exploratory randomized controlled trial. One hundred and seventy seven persons, 77–82 years, single living, and without need for home help were randomized to a no-intervention control group or to one of three occupational therapy interventions focused on promoting occupational engagement: an individual intervention, an activity group or a discussion group. In study I, effect sizes for leisure engagement and ability to perform activities of daily living (ADL) tasks were estimated for each intervention in relation to the control group to identify the most effective intervention at 3 and 12 months after baseline. In study II, the effects on quality adjusted life years (QALYs) and the total costs for the intervention, social services provided by the municipality and health care were used evaluate cost-effectiveness. Study III was a quasi-experimental clinical trial and included 95 persons, 65+, who had applied for municipality-based home help with bathing. For participants in the intervention group, occupational therapists implemented occupation-focused and occupation-based interventions. No occupational therapy intervention was implemented for those in the control group, but they were allocated home help services if judged to need it based on an assessment by a municipality care manager. Evaluations of ADL ability, self-rated health and allocated home help were implemented at baseline and after 15 weeks. Study IV involved the use of decision-modeling based on a five state Markov model that included levels of dependency in ADLs, place of residency and death. Probabilities for transitions between states in the model, QoL scores and societal costs for each state were derived from previous research. Overall, the model was based on research indicating that more severe levels of dependency reduced QALY scores and increased societal costs. Previous trials have provided evidence that an occupation-focused and occupation-based intervention implemented to reduce bathing disabilities increased the probability of independence of home help. The Markov model was used to evaluate cost-effectiveness over 8 years for an intervention compared to no intervention. Results The results of study I indicated that each intervention had a small positive effect on minimizing a decline in leisure engagement and/or ADL, but no intervention was clearly superior. In study II, the results indicated that the interventions delivered in a group format positively affected self-rated health. The discussion group was the most cost-effective intervention. The results of study III indicated that the intervention had no effect on ADL ability or self-rated health. There was, however, a large difference in the allocation of home help at follow up, indicating that the intervention was effective in reducing dependency on home help for bathing. The results of study IV indicated that compared to no intervention, the intervention resulted in a positive accumulation of QALYs and lower costs for every year during the entire 8 year period. Conclusion This thesis provides evidence to support the implementation of occupation-focused and occupation-based interventions for independent-living, community-dwelling older people in order to reduce their decline in occupational engagement and improve their self-rated health; the interventions also have the potential to be cost effective. This thesis also provides evidence that an occupation-focused and occupation-based intervention implemented for older people with bathing disabilities was effective in promoting independence from home help for bathing. Finally, an occupation-focused and occupation-based intervention that increased the probability of being independent of home help for bathing had a positive impact on the long term accumulation of QALYs and reduced societal costs and, therefore, can be considered very cost effective.

In general, people with severe psychiatric disability living in sheltered or supported housing lead passive, solitary lives. Current rehabilitative approaches often neglect considering an agentic perspective of the residents in sheltered or supported housing. Furthermore, the outreach and societal contexts are often not considered. Thus, practitioners tend to overlook the potential in providing support and rehabilitation that is adapted to their individual, collective and changing needs. My approach was to develop a model for Everyday Life Rehabilitation (ELR), which has a potential to promote agency while targeting recovery, meaningful daily occupations, social participation, and person-driven goals. We employed two occupational therapists (OT) and offered an intervention with ELR in a medium-sized municipality in northernSwedenand evaluated this intervention from the perspectives of residents and community care workers (CCW), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. This thesis comprises four studies that focus on a home and community context, late rehabilitation efforts, daily occupations, and client-centredness. The overall aim is to understand and evaluate the impact of recovery- and occupation-oriented interventions in a home context for people with severe psychiatric disability. The study settings are sheltered and supported housing facilities. The first study (n=6) explores the significance of home for occupational transformations. The analysis reveals how residential conditions facilitate rehabilitative interactions, generating occupational transformations such as increasing social competence and taking charge of daily occupations. The second study evaluates occupation- and health-related outcomes of the ELR-intervention for residents (n=17). Pre-, post-, and follow-up differences in tests scores on goal attainment, occupation, and health-related factors indicate that important progress is made. The third study explores residents’ (n=16) narratives about occupational transformations in the context of everyday life and life history. Narrative analysis discloses stories of ‘rediscovering agency’, referring to occupational and identity transformations. The fourth study illuminates community care workers’ (n=21) experiences of collaborating with residents and OTs, using ELR. The CCW’ view on residents, rehabilitation, and the own role, along with organisational conditions in the housing facility, seem to characterise different outlooks influencing the CCWs responsiveness or resistance to the intervention. In conclusion, rehabilitation in a supported housing context appears paradoxical due to tensions between opposing values such as authentic versus artificial, and independence versus dependence. However, if residents are engaged in challenging these tensions, they can function as ‘progressive tensions’ generating change. Considering the personal and social meaning of home also appears to be valuable. The intervention studies on ELR, demonstrate its value for participants and indicates that a recovery approach applying ELR would promote shared perspectives among residents, CCWs, and OTs, while facilitating ‘agent-supported rehabilitation’ and ‘out-of-housing strategies’. The thesis provides initial support for the use of ELR-interventions and proposes continued research. / Vardagslivets Rehabilitering (Everyday Life Rehabilitation)

The ability to perform everyday life occupations is a critical component in both evaluation and intervention for persons with mental retardation (MR). While the ability to perform personal and instrumental activities of daily living (ADL) has always been important for occupational therapy (OT) practice, there is an absence in OT literature and research with a focus on ADL and persons with MR. The overall aim of this thesis was to evaluate the validity of the Assessment of Motor and Process Skills (AMPS) for evaluation and intervention of ADL ability for persons with MR. In order to evaluate the evidence of validity of the AMPS ability measures based on relation to level of MR, two groups of participants with MR were evaluated with the AMPS (,#=22; #= 39). The results indicated expected moderate relationships between ADL motor and ADL process ability measures and level of MR, despite different methods used for evaluating level of MR. The results also indicated that the results of the AMPS evaluation could be used to directly describe and measure the consequences in performance of ADL tasks for persons with different levels of MR. The evidence of validity of the AMPS was further examined in a study including participants with different types of developmental disabilities (e.g., MR, cerebral palsy, spina bifida) (#=1724). An application of many-faceted Rasch analysis was used to examine goodness-of-fit of the responses for the tasks, skill items, and participants included in the study. All tasks and all items except one demonstrated acceptable goodness-of-fit to the model on the ADL motor and ADL process scales. An expected proportion of participants demonstrated acceptable goodness-of-fit on the ADL motor scale. On the ADL process scale, a slightly lower proportion of participants than expected demonstrated acceptable goodness-of-fit. The results indicated further that persons with more severe levels of MR and persons with more limited ADL process abilities demonstrated different response patterns across tasks and possibly items. The evidence of validity of the internal structure of the AMPS scales was also evaluated between persons with mild and moderate MR (#=178; #=170). Group specific ADL motor and ADL process skill item hierarchies were generated using many-faceted Rasch analyses and compared. The hierarchies of ADL motor and ADL process skill items remained stable across groups, indicating evidence of validity of the AMPS scales when used to evaluate persons with MR. The results also indicated that although participants with moderate MR demonstrated overall lower mean ADL motor and ADL process ability, they did perform some specific ADL motor and ADL process skills at a similar level as persons with mild MR. Finally, the utility of the AMPS ability measures for detecting change were examined in an intervention study including three female participants with moderate MR. The study was based on a single case design and evaluated the effectiveness of a structured occupational therapy intervention program. Improvements were found for the participants in relation to the implementation of the program, but the pattern of changes were different between the participants and across the dependent variables. ADL process ability was the only variable that improved across all participants. The results supported the ADL process abilities as sensitive measures for detecting changes in ADL ability of persons with MR. In conclusion, the results of these studies contribute to the evidence of validity of the AMPS ability measures and scales, specifically in relation to the evaluation of persons with MR. The finding that an OT program resulted in improved ADL process ability also suggest that the results of the AMPS can be used to plan as well as evaluate outcomes of OT practice. Further research is also suggested in order to improve validity evidence and utility of the AMPS when used with persons with MR. / <p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Umeå universitet, 2003</p>

Occupational engagement among older people is important to investigate as older people are the fastest growing segment in our society, and because occupational engagement is viewed within occupational therapy as one of the basic premises for health. Three perspectives of engagement are highlighted in this thesis: evaluation of occupational engagement, the repertoire of occupational engagement, and finally, the relation between occupational engagement and life satisfaction. The overall aim of this thesis was to study aspects of occupational engagement among older people, with a special focus on evaluation of the experiences of an occupation-based group programme, evaluation of leisure, the leisure repertoire, and the relation between occupational engagement and life satisfaction. The thesis is comprised of four studies which all contribute in different ways to an increasing understanding of occupational engagement among older people. In the first study (Study I), three older persons participated in a group activity programme and were interviewed about their experiences of occupational engagement. The qualitative interviews were done with each participant after each group session, in total 15 interviews. The other three studies (Studies II-IV) were based on a subgroup of a population studied in a cross-sectional population-based study, the Umeå 85+ study. Very old people with an MMSE score of 20 or more were included in Studies II, III, and IV (n=156). During home visits, they were interviewed about their occupational engagement (ADL and leisure) and their life satisfaction. The qualitative interviews analysed using a Grounded theory approach, revealed two different dimensions of experiences while engaged in a group programme. The participants described experiences of activation, with a creative force and a place for learning, but also experiences of transformation with reflection, adaptation, and finally, a personal synthesis. Evaluation of occupational engagement through measurement using the modified NPS Interest Checklist (MNPS) was made possible using Rasch analysis. The results revealed preliminary evidence for internal scale validity and person response validity. Scale and person reliability were Rasch equivalents of Cronbach alpha of .98 for items and .66 to .75 for persons, respectively. In their leisure repertoire, very old people were more likely to endorse Social and Cultural activities and least likely to endorse Ballgames and Equipment sport. Traditional gender differences and some differences between older persons in rural versus urban areas and between persons with different cognitive levels were also found. Finally, significant correlations were found between life satisfaction and both engagement in ADL (r =.31) and engagement in leisure (r =.34) among very old people. A forced entry regression revealed that both variables together explained slightly more (12.4%) than leisure alone (11.2%). As a conclusion and in relation to evaluation of occupational engagement during therapy, the experiences of engagement are described by the respondents from both a perspective of action and a perspective of inner reflection, and together they might support the developmental process among older people. Through using Rasch analysis, it was possible to convert ordinal data into linear measures and also to organize leisure occupations into a hierarchical repertoire of engagement. This repertoire gives further understanding for specific tasks and about the general relation between leisure dimensions. Finally, the contribution of occupational engagement to life satisfaction is likely essential, but explains only about 12% of total life satisfaction among very old people.

The human vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) stabilizes gaze during head movement. The reflex is typically tested in a clinic or laboratory using passive rotations or artificial stimuli which measure the amount of damage the vestibular apparatus has suffered. However, during everyday activities the vestibular system is stimulated by active, self generated head movements. Head movements are often rapid and associated with the goal of achieving either gaze-fixation or re-fixation. Patients who complain of on-going symptoms will typically identify a particular position or movement that aggravates their symptoms in their everyday life. There is a need to identify objective parameters which correlate with the subjective complaints of patients whose symptoms persist after vestibular damage. In the first study, a gaze-refixation task, patients who complain of ongoing symptoms (poorly-compensated), during rapid head turns, after unilateral vestibular de-afferentation (uVD) were compared with those who did not have the same complaints (well-compensated) and normal subjects. Well- and poorly-compensated groups were sorted according to responses on a standardized questionnaire. All subjects were then located in a real-world, non-laboratory environment in which poorly-compensated subjects reported experiencing symptoms. Each subject’s head, eye and gaze displacement and velocity, head rotation frequency and blink or eye-lid closure were measured and analysed and compared between ipsi- and contra-lesional head rotations within and between subject groups. When subjects are able to generate their own active head rotations it has been suggested that a number of vestibular and extra-vestibular strategies might be employed to compensate for an impaired VOR. In subsequent studies, high resolution scleral search coils were used to identify the compensatory mechanisms used during active head rotations during a gaze-fixation task. A corrective saccade is typically observed during passive ipsilesional head rotations or “impulses” and might be potentiated during rapid, active or self-generated head rotations. The conditions which predict or contribute to the generation of the rapid, corrective eye movement were investigated. The results were compared with responses to passive head impulses of matched velocity and acceleration to determine if active head impulses could be used to identify a lesioned vestibular apparatus as is routinely clinically achieved with passive head impulses.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karol. inst., 2004. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Linköping : Univ., 2002. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karolinska institutet, 2006. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine whether across-trials inconsistency in reaction time (RT), in addition to level of cognitive performance, is predictive of older adults’ performance on a measure of everyday problem solving through a series of three investigations. A sample of community dwelling non-demented older adults, ranging in age from 62 to 92, completed the Everyday Problems Test (EPT), a measure of everyday problem solving that indexes instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). Performance on the EPT varied according to age, cognitive status, and education, and was significantly predicted by measures of global cognitive status, cognitive decline, and various basic cognitive abilities (i.e., speed of processing, fluid abilities, episodic memory, crystallized abilities). Both inconsistency and mean latencies on measures of RT were found to be significantly associated with concurrent EPT performance, such that slower and more inconsistent RTs were associated with poorer everyday problem solving abilities. Finally, inconsistency in RT made a unique contribution in predicting performance on the EPT two years later, over and above age, education, and various basic cognitive abilities. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that the relationship between inconsistency in RT and future EPT performance was mediated by fluid and crystallized abilities. Neither inconsistency nor cognitive functioning were significantly associated with changes in EPT performance across two years. Examination of the relationships between IADL functioning, as assessed through self- and informant-report, and inconsistency and basic cognitive abilities demonstrated that everyday problem solving and measures of IADLs tap into related but distinct constructs. The overall pattern of results obtained lends support to the idea that inconsistency in RT represents a behavioural marker of neurological dysfunction. In addition, the present investigation is the first to suggest a relationship between inconsistency in RT and real-world outcomes, such as everyday problem solving and IADL functioning.

Syftet med studien var att beskriva användning av strategier och den betydelse de har för engagemang i aktivitet hos vuxna personer med förvärvad hjärnskada. En kvalitativ litteraturstudie har genomförts. Datainsamlingen skedde via sökning i lämpliga databaser utefter studiens syfte. Totalt 15 artiklar inkluderades till denna litteraturstudie. Insamlat data analyserades efter Fribergs anvisningar för kvalitativa litteraturstudier. Resultatet presenteras under ett övergripande tema; ”Strategier för engagemang i aktivitet” som innefattar de fyra huvudkategorierna ”Planering av aktiviteter i vardagen”, ”Selektera och prioritera aktiviteter utefter situation och sammanhang”, ”Planera det specifika utförandet” samt ”Omgivningens stöd för engagemang i aktiviteter”. Studien påvisade att personer med förvärvad hjärnskada använde sig av flera olika strategier för att möjliggöra engagemang i aktivitet men dess betydelse för individen skilde sig åt. Vissa strategier innebar att personerna själva kunde bemästra aktiviteter, medan andra strategier omfattade stöd från omgivning och personer i deras närhet för engagemang i aktiviteter. Samtidigt som stöd av andra personer främjade engagemang kunde detta upplevas som ett hinder för självständighet i aktivitet. Att planera sina aktiviteter kunde även förvärra symtom från skadan. Att tillämpa strategier kunde således medföra en problematik i aktivitet. Att samla denna kunskap har betydelse för det fortsatta arbetet inom arbetsterapi i att utforma mer precisa och individanpassade interventioner för personer med förvärvad hjärnskada och därmed bidra till en förbättrad rehabilitering. / The purpose of this study was to describe the use of strategies and its meaning for the engagement in activity for adults with acquired brain injuries. A qualitative study where used as method and 15 articles where included in this study. The collected data has been analyzed using Friberg’s suggestion for studying qualitative studies. The result is presented under an overall theme "Strategies for engagement in activities", which includes the four main categories “Planning of activities in the everyday”, “Select and prioritize activities according to the situation and context”, “Planning of the specific performance” and “The support from others for engagement in activities”. The study showed that people with acquired brain injury were using many strategies to enable engagement in activities but the value for the individual differed. Some strategies meant that the individuals independently were able to master activities, while other strategies included support from people in their environment for engagement in activities. While support from other people improved engagement, it could be perceived as a hindrance to independence in activity. Planning activities could also exacerbate their symptoms from injury. To apply strategies could thus cause problem in activity. This knowledge is important for the continued work in occupational therapy in designing more precise and individualized interventions for people with acquired brain injury and thereby improve rehabilitation.