Patient and Public Involvement in Occupational Therapy Health Research: A Scoping Review.
Toril Beate Røssvoll, Tove Aminda Hanssen, Jan H Rosenvinge and 2 others
PMID 35549479WHAT IT FOUND
Patient and public involvement in occupational therapy research varied widely in how it was done and when it happened.
None of the included studies formally evaluated the impact of this involvement, though researchers reported anecdotal benefits to study design and ethics.
Key findings
01Patient and public involvement appeared across all stages of the included studies, but only one study reported involvement in every stage.
02No included study formally evaluated the impact of patient and public involvement, although eleven reported anecdotal impacts, mainly on research design.
03Public collaborators influenced research design by adding questions important to the study population and helped participants express themselves more freely during data collection.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The review only included English-language studies from 2010 to 2020, so it may miss relevant work published in other languages or earlier. Multiprofessional studies were excluded, which may narrow the range of PPI practices that could inform occupational therapy research. None of the included studies formally evaluated the impact of PPI, so all reported benefits are anecdotal. The authors acknowledge a risk of missing relevant papers due to variations in terminology and indexing across databases.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest and received no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the anecdotal reports of improved research design as proof that patient and public involvement makes studies better. None of the included studies formally evaluated impact, so the benefits described are what researchers said happened, not measured outcomes.