Providing Verbal Assistance When Assessing Individuals Living with a Traumatic Brain Injury.
Mireille Gagnon-Roy, Nathalie Bier, Stéphanie Boulé-Riley and 4 others
PMID 34463153WHAT IT FOUND
Expert OTs described verbal assistance during dynamic TBI assessments as flexible, not a fixed sequence.
They first encourage doing more alone, then adjust cues based on safety, progress, requests, and context.
Key findings
01OTs described providing and grading verbal assistance as a flexible process that varied the method, delay, speed, and explicitness of cues.
02OTs said they provided assistance when safety or emotional issues were present, the client could not progress, the client asked for help, or the client went off task.
03OTs said time available, evaluator experience, improved understanding of the client, and client familiarity with the task influenced how assistance was graded.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
Only three OTs and three client videos were studied, so the themes may not represent less experienced OTs or other clients. The OTs were highly experienced and specifically trained in the IADL Profile, so their reasoning may not match typical practice. The videos were from assessments done almost 10 years earlier, and the OTs interpreted them with their current expertise, so this is retrospective reasoning. The study did not test whether this way of giving verbal assistance improves the assessment of true independence. One OT did not mention some themes, which may reflect differences in tacit knowledge or interpretation.
Declared interests
Funding was from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé; no other conflicts are reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these themes as evidence that verbal assistance improves the assessment of true independence. The study only described three experienced OTs' reasoning about past assessment videos.