Planning, designing and evaluating a guide for online therapy sessions, using the values and principles of the Occupational Performance Coaching intervention.

Abstract

Executive Summary This project has been created in collaboration with bOunceT, a third sector social enterprise service in Scotland. The service has granted permission to use their name (Appendix 1 ). bOunceT works with families and service users, with the purpose of enabling their occupational participation and improving quality of life. As a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the team at bOunceT have identified a need for increasing their input with service users and their families via an online platform. Furthermore, the service identified a want for implementing the Occupational Performance Coaching (OPC) (Graham et al. 2009) intervention into practice, in order to allow for the creation of home/community based goals for service users and their families. The creation of the resource guide has a clear occupational focus, as it includes the creation of occupation-based goals with the purpose of improving performance and social participation of meaningful occupations. The development of the resource for bOunceT staff and students on placement has provided them with a guide for increasing their knowledge and skills within the scope of occupational therapy, in order to further their continuing professional development (HCPC 2016).To support the need for a service development of an online OPC resource guide, a literature review of five articles was carried out, all of which involved the implementation of OPC into practice, via an online platform. The themes that emerged from this literature were occupational performance, self-determination theory and telehealth. The reviewed literature identified many benefits to support the implementation of this intervention into practice. To achieve the project aim of developing a resource guide for staff and students at bOunceT, a questionnaire was administered to them, to gather their expectations of he content and structure of the resource. The following points were identified from the questionnaire and incorporated into the development of the resource: Text box 1: Questionnaire Findings • As majority of the participants identified that they had a limited knowledge of the OPC Intervention, the resource included background information on the intervention and links to relevant literature to further develop an understanding of the intervention. • The format chosen for the resource guide was a PDF document, as this was identified in the findings of the questionnaire as the most accessible form. • The content of the resource was identified from the results of the questionnaire and from relevant literature. The content was identified as information on OPC, how it fits with vision of bOunceT, identification of who OPC is suitable for, how it fits with bOunceT service pathway, implementation of OPC, creation of OPC goals, how to record OPC sessions and how to evaluate the intervention.The analysis of the questionnaire and the review of literature contributed to achieving the project's aims and objectives. The resource guide was planned in partnership with the project lead, project partners and project supervisor. A draft of the resource guide was developed by the project lead, which was then evaluated using feedback from the project partners, supervisors and author of OPC. This project can be developed further by carrying out a future evaluation of the OPC on line sessions, once it has been implemented into practice by bOunceT staff and students. An abstract for the Royal College of Occupational Therapists Annual Conference (2021) can be found in Appendix 2.