Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences

This textbook chapter describes the principles and steps of evidence based practice, including common study designs, appraisal, evaluation and hierarchies of evidence in OT.

Baker, N., & Tickle-Degnen, L. (2013). Evidence-based practice: Integrating evidence to inform practice. In B. A. Schell, G. Gillen, M. Scaffa, & E. S. Cohn (Eds.), Willard and Spackman’s occupational therapy (12th ed., pp. 398–412). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

To promote EBP, AOTA has developed a number of resources to help members find and utilize clinically relevant literature to respond to both their clients’ needs and external demands for information from the scientific literature. Some resources are restricted to AOTA members only.

From the AOTA website: "The Section 12 APP (Approved Provider Program) Criteria and Guidelines require professional development (PD) activities that are supported by the most current literature and resources, and highest level of supporting evidence available."

From the blog at OTPotential.com, this post describes the importance of understanding 'levels of evidence' in occupational therapy and discusses some of the standard ways of looking at levels of evidence in OT.

This 2011 paper presents a three-sided pyramid model of research evidence portraying the types of evidence OT practitioners may use to drive decisions about providing care to clients.

Tomlin, G., & Borgetto, B. (2011). Research pyramid: A new evidence-based practice model for occupational therapy. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 65(2), 189-196.

The evidence hierarchy from Oxford's Center for Evidence-Based Medicine describes levels of evidence for different types of questions (e.g., therapy, prognosis, diagnosis, etc)

The AJOT suggests that authors writing for publication follow PRISMA guidance as a basis for reporting systematic reviews.