Occupational Therapy Assistant: Community Practice Program Guide

Recommended Places to Search

Search Strategies

• For these searches, a more general search is probably better than a very specific one. (Obviously, it will still need to be relevant to the focus of your needs assessment and topic.)
• This can also be a good opportunity to specify the population on which you're focused. Try adding "children," "families," "elderly," "veterans," or another specific population group to your search to narrow things down. 
• It's a good idea to limit your database searches by date or filter your results by date so that you are considering recent data. A general rule of thumb is that your sources should be no more than 5 years old (especially those chosen to validate the problem you've identified). 
• Web searching would also be fine here. Just make sure you're using a high quality, reliable source. I also had good luck finding information on government websites or professional organization websites. 

Example Search

I searched on the AOTA website for "homelessness" and found the decision guide developed by AOTA and the National Healthcare for the Homeless Council.

Example Source on Identified Problem

American Occupational Therapy Association (2021). AOTA decision guide: Working with adults experiencing homelessness (across practice settings). https://www.aota.org/practice/practice-settings/-/media/91527eb34aee43a9a3bf39f33d288c7f.ashx

Recommended Places to Search

Search Strategies

• Adding the words "occupational therapy" or "occupation*" to your database searches can really help narrow things down to OT. 
• Adding "intervention" or "program" to your search can help be more specific
• "Community" or "group" can also be helpful words to add to your search as they will (hopefully) retrieve results having to do with group interventions as opposed to individual ones

Example Search

I searched the Health and Medicine (Gale OneFile) database

I used the advanced search to search for "group intervention" AND "occupational therapy" AND "time management"

Then I made sure to check the boxes for Full Text and Peer Reviewed, and limited the results to the last 5 years

Example Source on Solution

Holmefur, M., Lidstrom-Holmqvist, K., Roshanay, A. H., Arvidsson, P., White, S., & Janeslatt, G. (2019). Pilot study of Let's Get Organized: A group intervention for improving time management. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 73(5). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600789068/HRCA?u=la74598&sid=bookmark-HRCA&xid=ac2a4e1a

Things to Document AS You Go:

• The article or source (You can download, save, send, share, or whatever you prefer, but just hang onto it!)
• Full source citation (Trust me, you will thank yourself later.)
• Web address / permalink (This is especially important if using a database source as they can be harder to track down again later.) 
• Notes or observations about the source to help you remember later! (Why did this source look promising? Which section seemed most relevant?)