Occupational Therapy Pre-Operative Intervention for Total Hip Replacement Patients; A Qualitative Enquiry

This project aimed to explore the experiences of occupational therapists working in a specialist orthopedic hospital. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with eight occupational therapists working with total hip replacement patients, in an orthopedic hospital within the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) as part of a service review project. The data was recorded and transcribed and analyzed using the Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Six themes emerged from the data; (1) pre-operative intervention should be provided for all THR procedures, (2) pre-operative occupational therapy is key to timely discharge, (3) patient education is an important part of pre-operative occupational therapy intervention, (4) predicting some patients' needs pre-operatively can be challenging, (5) certain patients need to have post-operative occupational therapy and (6) occupational therapists with greater experience are more confident to treat patients pre-operatively. Thus, occupational therapy appears to be key to facilitating the rapid discharge of total patients in the current climate of accelerated pathways of care, as a comprehensive pre-operative occupational therapy service reduces the need for post-operative intervention for certain patients.