Occupational Therapy Can Be One of the Great Ideas of Myopic 21st Century Health Policy Experts

(with deep apologies to the memory of Mary Reilly)Social media has been one long party this week in the occupational therapy world with therapists and membership associations popping champagne corks over the recent article that appeared in Medical Care Research and Review entitled " Higher hospital spending on occupational therapy is associated with lower readmission rates. " Click here for the abstract, but please go read the whole thing.Once you get beyond the abstract you get straight to the nut of the problem where the authors admit right in the introduction that " the relationship between hospital spending and quality...is poorly understood in the literature... "For background reading on this precise issue and concerns about how people are defining ' quality ' in health care outcomes clickhereandhere.There is unquestionably some ' value ' (however one may choose to define that term) in decreasing hospital readmission rates.  People who are NOT in the hospital are almost certainly better off than those who are in the hospital, even if we reduce our operational definition of ' better off ' to some biomedical metric of their health status.  So to be clear it is important to note that some ' value ' is achieved in decreasing readmission to hospitals.That point being stipulated, we must return to the larger concern for the profession of occupational therapy:Is it the intention of the profession of occupational therapy to serve the myopic perspectives of 21st ce...

Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - September 16, 2016 Category: Occupational Health Tags: health insurance OT practice philosophy policy Source Type: blogs