Effectiveness of occupational therapy in improving activities of daily living performance in complete cervical tetraplegic patients; A quasi experimental study

Objective: To determine the effectiveness of Occupational therapy (OT) in improving activities of daily living performance in complete cervical tetraplegic patients. Methods: A quasi experimental study was conducted at Paraplegic Center Peshawar from May 2018 to March 2019. Seventy two spinal cord injury patients with complete cervical tetraplegia having age 18-60 years were included in the study using non probability convenience sampling technique. A trained Occupational therapist conducted two occupational therapy sessions per day, three times a week on alternative days for a period of six weeks. Self-care portion of Spinal cord injury independence measure (SCIM) was used to collect pre and post data. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 20. Results: Mean age of the participants was 30.21±13.52.Majority of the participants were (n= 61, 84.7%) male while remaining 11 (15.3%) participants were female. Pre self-care total score was 0.39±0.987 and post self-care total score was 7.17±5.536. There was significant differences (P value <0.05) between pre and post scores of feeding, upper & lower body bathing, upper & lower body dressing, grooming and total self-care scores. Conclusion: Occupational therapy significantly improves activities of daily living performance in complete cervical tetraplegic spinal cord injury patients. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.2.1002 How to cite this:Arsh A, Anwar Z, Zeb A, Ilyas SM. Effectiveness of occupational therapy in improving activities of daily living performance in complete cervical tetraplegic patients; A quasi experimental study. Pak J Med Sci. 2020;36(2):---------.  doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.2.1002 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.