The potential of place-based occupational therapy to support aging-in-place: A qualitative study.

Only seven therapists took part, all in Singapore, and all volunteered through the researcher's own professional network; three were her former colleagues. This is a narrow set of views, not a representative sample. The study asked therapists what place-based OT could do. Most answers describe a service that does not yet exist, so nothing here shows the model changes anything for older adults. Therapists may have answered positively because they were being asked about a new model of care, which the authors name as a risk of social desirability bias. The first author is a senior OT who ran the interviews and did the coding herself, and the authors name her own perspective as a possible influence on the data. No older adults were interviewed, so what clients would actually want from the service is missing. No costs were worked out; the authors say cost-effectiveness still needs to be investigated.

The research was funded by the Tan Tock Seng Hospital Occupational Therapy Enabling Fund (2023-001). The authors declared no conflicts of interest, and the paper states that the three participants who were the researcher's former colleagues had no working relationship with her at the time of recruitment.

Do not read this as evidence that place-based occupational therapy works. No service was set up and no older adult was followed; seven therapists described what they thought a future service could do, often in the future tense, and the authors themselves note that participants may have answered positively because they were being asked about a new model of care.