Promoting and Measuring Fidelity of Occupational Therapy Interventions: A Scoping Review.

Only English-language, peer-reviewed articles were included, and only those with an explicit focus on fidelity of interventions led by occupational therapists; the authors say this may have excluded other forms of knowledge and reinforced a Western perspective. The authors did not appraise the quality of the 59 included studies, so the review shows which methods were used, not which ones worked. Most included studies were published from 2015 onwards and the largest share came from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, so the practices described may not match your service. Because this is a scoping review, the methods are not compared against each other and no conclusion can be drawn about whether any fidelity approach changes patient outcomes. The reasons studies chose one method over another are mostly not reported, so the pattern of use may reflect what was practical for those researchers rather than what is best.

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship or publication of the article, and declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Do not read this as evidence that fidelity checklists, supervision or session recording make occupational therapy work better. The review catalogued which methods therapists used, did not compare them against each other, and did not appraise the quality of the included studies, so it says nothing about what happened to patients.