Introduction/Rationale: Occupational therapists are increasingly asked to demonstrate effectiveness, appropriateness, and efficiency of interventions to funding bodies. This requires the definition of quality indicators.
Objectives: With this scoping review, we aimed to identify quality indicators that are used internationally (focused on Europe and English-speaking countries abroad) for quantifying the quality of occupational therapy services
Methods/Approach: We searched databases from medicine, health sciences, and related fields, including MEDLINE and CINAHL Complete. We also conducted free internet search via Google. Additionally, we contacted several national occupational therapy (OT) associations and asked for access to otherwise inaccessible documents.
Results/Practice implications: We identified 32 studies and documents from six countries. We described several process-level and functional outcome indicators, one goal-attainment-based outcome indicator (GAS), and one patient-reported experience measure (PRO-Ergo). Process indicators were mostly not reflective of OT interventions. Functional outcome indicators were partially appropriate for use in OT, but usually highly specific to certain client groups. GAS was found to be a flexible measure which can reflect outcomes on body structure/function levels as well as activity/participation levels, while PRO-Ergo provided less specific, but very client-centred outcomes.
Conclusions/Contribution to the occupational therapy profession: To demonstrate the value of OT and sharpen the profession’s profile, quality indicators must be reflective of OT’s unique contributions to health and well-being. Our study showed that different types of quality indicators differ in their capacity to do so. Therefore, it is important that OT as a profession takes an active role in the definition of quality indicators.