Developing a vocational rehabilitation report writing protocol - a collaborative action research process

Abstract

A vocational rehabilitation interest group of occupational therapists in the publicin some hospitals newly appointed and inexperienced occupational therapists refuse to write vocational rehabilitation reports, leaving it to their more experienced colleagues and therefore perpetuating the challenges and complications mentioned above.The VRTT identified report writing as a priority practice problem to be addressed as a section of their bi-monthly meetings. The aim of this study was to develop an easily understandable, user friendly vocational rehabilitation report writing protocol with standardised report templates for the type of reports most commonly written in public healthcare. The reports identified to be most commonly written in Gauteng's public healthcare and for which templates were needed were: Functional capacity evaluation (FCE) reports; Policy and Procedure on Incapacity Leave and Ill-health Retirement for public service employee's (PILIR) reports; Disability Grant (DG) reports; Vocational Rehabilitation Screening Tool reports and medico-legal reports. The function of the report writing protocol would therefore be to: set a standard for vocational rehabilitation report writing; to standardise the format of a report; provide practical guidelines for inexperienced occupational therapists for writing vocational rehabilitation reports and thereby to enable therapists to spend less clinical time writing reports.This article forms part of a PhD study, the purpose of which is to transform vocational rehabilitational services in Gauteng's public health care through action research. The article aims to describe Doi: http://dx

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