Occupational Formulation: A Scoping Review of Its Development and Use.

Most of the 102 sources are book chapters and grey literature rather than research, so the review could not check the quality of any of them. Almost all the sources come from the United Kingdom and the United States and from mental health settings, so the review says little about physical rehabilitation, children's services or other countries. The authors accept they may have missed relevant work: the ETHOS thesis repository was not searched because of a technical problem at the British Library, books may not have been indexed in Google Books, the search terms may not appear in the text of hard-copy books, and authors may describe the same idea without using those terms. The formal expert consultation panel planned in the protocol was replaced by informal conversations with people the first author already knew. The few studies with outcome numbers tested whole occupational therapy programmes in which formulation was only one component, and the dementia trial was summarised from a book chapter rather than the original report. Only the work of Parkinson and colleagues set out a clear structure for documenting a formulation, so the review's conclusions about structure rest heavily on a small group of authors.

The first author, Lorrae Mynard, is the founder of occupationalformulation.com, a business that provides occupational formulation training; the review states that the work began before the business was founded in response to training requests. The other authors report no conflicts of interest. The first author's work on the review was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, and open access publishing was covered by Monash University through an agreement with the publisher. The review notes that none of the sources it included reported funding data.

Do not read this review as evidence that occupational formulation improves outcomes. The four benefits it describes were proposed by two authors rather than tested, most of the sources are book chapters, opinion pieces and small surveys, the review could not appraise the quality of any source, and the few studies that reported outcome numbers evaluated whole occupational therapy programmes in which formulation was only one component.