The Use of the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure as an Outcome of a Pain Management Program

Abstract

The last three decades have seen the emergence of measures to assess the efficacy of pain management programs. Recently there has been interest in measures that assess clients' perceptions of their own performance. The Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM) (Law et al, 1994, 1998) is an individualized measure designed for use by occupational therapists to detect a self-perceived change in occupational performance problems over time. It may be an important extra dimension to assessing the outcomes of pain management programs. The aim of this study was to ascertain the validity of the COPM as an outcome measure for the Liverpool Pain Management Program. One hundred and six clients were recruited to the study and 87 clients completed a battery of tests including the COPM at baseline, end of program and 3 month follow-up. Results of the study demonstrated that the COPM showed good evidence of concurrent criterion validity and sensitivity to change.

Canadian Occupational Performance Measure performance scale: Validity and responsiveness in chronic pain

“…The results of this study showed that the COPM-P was only weakly to moderately associated with the outcomes of the PDI and We were not able to find support for the construct validity and responsiveness of the COPM-P in this population and setting. Although many authors have explained their results differently, the results of this study are in line with prior studies, finding mostly low or no correlations [17,21,[29][30][31]34,38].…”

“…The extent to which pain interfered with daily life significantly reduced as well. Both Persson et al [23] and Carpenter et al [29] revealed a significant improvement of COPM-P after a pain rehabilitation program as well, resembling the program of Reade, supporting the absolute responsiveness of the COPM.…”

“…Besides feasibility, other clinimetric properties of the COPM have been studied in different populations (for an overview, see Table 1) [17,[21][22][23][24][25][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. In this article, we prefer to use the term clinimetrics, which is similar to psychometrics but indicating measurement in clinical research [47].…”

“…Four studies investigated the clinimetric properties of the COPM in patients with chronic pain [23,29,35,38]. Of these studies, Rochman et al [35] and Carpenter et al [29] studied the validity of the COPM and showed low correlations at baseline and moderate correlations after treatment for performance (COPM) and pain severity, pain-related disability, self-efficacy related to pain, psychological well-being, and psychosocial functioning.…”

“…Of these studies, Rochman et al [35] and Carpenter et al [29] studied the validity of the COPM and showed low correlations at baseline and moderate correlations after treatment for performance (COPM) and pain severity, pain-related disability, self-efficacy related to pain, psychological well-being, and psychosocial functioning. The only studies that investigated responsiveness of the COPM in patients with chronic pain were performed by Walsh et al [38] and Persson et al [23].…”