Navigating Cognitive Screening and Service Delivery for Sensory Impairment in Occupational Therapy.
Shirley Dumassais, Jennifer Campos, Margaret Kathleen Pichora-Fuller and 5 others
PMID 40734463WHAT IT FOUND
Occupational therapists adapted cognitive screening most for clients who are hard of hearing, less for vision impairment, and least for dual sensory impairment, where nine of 90 made no adaptation.
Satisfaction was lowest for dual sensory impairment.
Key findings
01Therapists most often screened cognition with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (85 of 90) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (69 of 90); only three named a screening test adapted for sensory impairment.
02Therapists rated their ability to serve clients with dual sensory impairment lower (mean 2.32 out of 5) than clients with hearing impairment or vision impairment alone, and rated hearing and vision impairment the same (mean 3.06 for both).
03The most commonly chosen number of accommodations was seven for clients who are hard of hearing, six for vision impairment and three for dual sensory impairment, and nine therapists reported using no unique accommodations for dual sensory impairment.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
Convenience sample of 90 occupational therapists who volunteered. The authors state their sample is not representative enough of the Canadian workforce to generalise from. 66 of the 90 worked in Quebec, and 96% identified as female. The response rate could not be calculated, because the authors do not know how many therapists received the invitation. The multiple-choice format limited what therapists could report. The survey did not ask which assistive technologies clients used or whether they were working. Clients were grouped broadly as hard of hearing, deaf, vision impaired or dual sensory impaired, with no information on cause, severity or age of onset. Only four therapists said they had expertise in vision impairment, and none reported expertise in hearing impairment or dual sensory impairment. Self-reported and cross-sectional: it describes what therapists say they do, not what clients experienced, and it did not test whether any accommodation improved the accuracy of screening.
Declared interests
The only funding named is the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (Consortium canadien en neurodégénérescence associée au vieillissement). No competing interests are declared in the text supplied.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the accommodation counts as proof that these strategies make cognitive screening more accurate. The survey asked therapists what they report doing, not what happened to their clients, and there was no comparison group and no client outcome.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →