There is a growing emphasis on providing comprehensive care to pediatric patients who have experienced a concussion. Occupational therapists (OT) are emerging practitioners in this field focused on return to function. The Occupational Therapy Practice Framework describes five domains including occupation (work, play, education), client factors (values, beliefs, body function), performance skills (social, motor), performance patterns (habits, roles, routines), and context (environment) which can be affected. OTs provide skilled, client-centered interventions to help patients return to activities they want and need to do.

49 retrospective and 106 prospective patients met inclusion criteria. When an OT is present in the initial evaluation, more patients report impacts in the domains of performance skills (p=.0075) and performance patterns (p=<0.001) than when seen by a physician alone. A greater number of affected domains were reported overall (p=.0424) when the neurologist and OT conducted a joint evaluation compared with evaluation by physician alone.

There is a benefit to having an OT on a pediatric concussion treatment team, to better identify and treat all impacted occupational domains. Future studies will work to demonstrate this benefit looking at improvement in number of reported impacted domains and by using the validated performance measures before and after OT intervention.