Assessing a child’s functional abilities and limitations can provide useful information for occupational therapists to develop individualised intervention plans. Usually paediatric assessments require parents to rate their child on different domains of health and functional performance. To do so, parents need to be able to understand the assessment content and instructions to rate their child accurately. The primary purpose of this study was to examine if parents in Malaysia understood the content and instructions of three assessments: the Sensory Profile Caregiver Questionnaire (SP), the Sensory Processing Measure Home Form (SPM) and the Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function Parent Form (BRIEF). The secondary purpose was to examine perceptions about the clarity and relevancy of each of the items in each assessment. Thirty parents, recruited using convenience sampling, completed a survey about the assessments. In general, the parents indicated no problems or only minor problems in understanding the content and instructions of all three assessments. The parents also provided comments to improve the clarity of the assessment items. Comments were primarily related to the terms or jargon language used. Elaborations of the terms or jargon were later provided based on the parents’ comments. All three assessments were identified as relevant to be used in the Malaysian population. The results suggest that all three assessments can be used by parents and are suitable to be implemented by occupational therapists working with children in Malaysia.
Parent-rated assessments ; Malaysian children ; Face validity ; Cross-cultural relevancy

Handwriting difficulty is one of the main issues among school children, especially for those with motor coordination issues. The aim of this systematic review is to evaluate the effectiveness of occupational therapy interventions in handwriting components for children with motor coordination issues. Current research articles were systematically searched according to the PRISMA guidelines. Two hundred and sixty-eight (n=268) research articles were identified; however, only ten (n=10) were eligible to be evaluated for this study. Studies were appraised by using McMaster Critical Review Form-Quantitative Studies. Descriptive synthesis was executed due to the heterogeneity of included studies. The review found various types of intervention conducted by occupational therapists to have a positive effect on handwriting performance components among children with motor coordination issues. Types of intervention used were visual, motor, perceptual, sensory, activity of daily living skills, training device and assistive technology and specific handwriting programs. Most handwriting intervention showed effectiveness to improve handwriting performance in motor function, visual and perceptual components. Future research should focus on homogeneity of Occupational Therapy (OT) intervention to improve handwriting performance by using specific handwriting programmes and similar standardised evaluation instruments. Practitioners of OT intervention should consider collaboration with teachers, parents and other health professionals to expedite effectiveness of intervention in handwriting performance components.

Introduction: The prevalence of children with autism spectrum disorder is increasing each year. Intervention programmes towards improving the occupational needs such as daily activities of these children are limited. This study aimed to collect opinions from advisory panel for the content validation of the three developed intervention programmes to be implemented among children with autism spectrum disorder aged between 6 to 12 years. The intervention programmes are; i) self-regulated learning, ii) sensory integration intervention and iii) activity-based intervention. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted. Twenty occupational therapists with more than three years’ experience working with children with autism spectrum disorders were recruited as advisory panel members. Researchers-developed questionnaire was used. The questionnaire consists of nine to eleven items. Each item consists of a five-point Likert scale for quantitative responses and open-ended questions for qualitative responses. Results: Advisory panel ratings of ‘Good’ to ‘Excellent’ was reported across most items in all three intervention programmes. Overall results suggested that the intervention programmes content was rated to be suitable for children with autism spectrum disorder. Constructive comments were adopted to clarify the activities and structure of the intervention programmes. Final development of the intervention programmes is presented. Conclusion: This study provides confidence for the interventions to be incorporated into the future randomised controlled trial.

Introduction: Occupational therapists have been developing various handwriting intervention that has fundamental occupational goals with known validity to guide professional practice in the treatment of children with handwriting difficulties. This study aimed to explore the development and content validation of a developed handwriting intervention programme for children with handwriting difficulties. Methods: This study employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology based on the sequential exploratory design in two main stages. The first stage is the focus group discussion and followed by a validation procedure using face and content validity scored by the expert reviewers. A total of thirteen experts participated in this study. Results: The findings were analyzed thematically according to physical appearance, language used, and content in the developed programme. The face and content validity report a convincing value, ranging from 0.99 to 1.00 of S-CVI values on four aspects, relevancy, clarity, simplicity, and ambiguity in the developed programme. Conclusion: This study provided preliminary approval for the development and validation of a handwriting intervention programme for children with handwriting difficulties to support the demand in the Malaysian school curriculum.

Self-care is defined as activities performed by individuals, families, and communities to enhance their health, prevent diseases, limit illnesses, and restore health. Previous research has mainly focused on self-care skills of older adults in either institution or residential homes separately but limited studies have compared between both these settings. This study aimed to compare the self-care skills between institutionalised and home dwelling older adults at selected area in Malaysia. A total of 43 participants aged 60 years old and above were recruited in our study; (23 participants were home-dwelled older adults and 19 participants were recruited from institutionalised older adults located in Kuala Lumpur). The Malay Version of Performance Assessment of Self-Care Skills (M-PASS-HOME) 4.0 was used focusing on four main subtests of self-skills; oral hygiene, trimming toenails, house mobility and shower mobility. The differences in self-care skills between institutionalised and home dwelling older adults are statistically significant (p<0.01) in the aspects of independency for all self-care activities. The results of this study revealed that home dwelling older adults group are more independent in self-care activities of oral hygiene, trimming toenails, house mobility and shower mobility compared to institutionalised group.