Hand therapy (HT) is a specialty area of occupational therapy (OT) practice that focuses on rehabilitation for individuals with hand and upper extremity related conditions with aim to return to performance of daily activities required for life. As with other health professionals, occupational therapy practitioners (OTPs) have a duty to the public to ensure that services rendered are safe and use evidence-based best practices to improve patient health-outcomes. In HT clinics, OTPs face numerous challenges implementing evidence-based practice (EBP) including a lack of time, skills, and misperceptions of EBP (Scurlock-Evans et al., 2014), as well as reimbursement and funding models which incentivize high productivity over time to evaluate the evidence and integrate into clinical practice. The cost of OTPs not implementing EBP into their clinical decisions negatively impacts health outcomes of the patients under their care.
The Hand Therapy with Evidence Based Practice (HT-EBP) program aims to enhance patient care through enhancing private HT clinics adoption of up-to-date research evidence into clinical practice. The HT-EBP program is designed for use in community-based private HT clinics that typically have less than 10 OTPs employed. A commitment of two OTPs, preferably one seasoned and one entry level, coming together in a mentor-mentee relationship is needed to implement the program. This program requires the participating clinics and OTPs to actively engage in the development of clinical care plans through review of research evidence on selected clinical diagnoses.
Resulting from the HT-EBP program, the HT clinic will be able to provide evidence-based quality care while the OTP participants will develop professionally in the field of HT, gaining firm knowledge in clinical topics and building clinical confidence at the same time. This program will be further enhanced through 1) access to high quality research databases from clinic affiliated universities, 2) professional organization’s focus on continuing education courses that develop research knowledge and analytic skills for OTPs, and 3) collaborating with clinic managers to facilitate more time for clinicians to engage in acquiring and creating knowledge in chosen clinical topics of interests.
The HP-EBP will first be piloted at the author’s private HT clinic prior to recruiting other private HT clinics to adopt the program. The HT-EBP program will aim to address the challenges that OTPs face when implementing EBP by working with universities, professional organizations. With time, it is anticipated that a significant volume of evidence-based clinical care plans would be compiled and shared among OTPs in HT, thus enhancing care for patients with hand conditions. Successful implementation of the HT-EBP program may have the potential to serve as a template for other healthcare specialties to deploy EBP.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/48753 |
| Date | 13 May 2024 |
| Creators | Wong, Josephine |
| Contributors | Slater, Craig |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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