ABSTRACT
Objective : Recently, children with more severe disabilities are being hospitalized for inpatient rehabilitation. Therefore, it is becoming more difficult to adequately assess the effect of rehabilitation by conventional methods alone. The objective of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM), which is an open-ended questionnaire that allows patients to prioritize their needs and rate their performance in different tasks of daily living as well as their satisfaction in performing them. Methods : The COPM performance and satisfaction scores of 81 patients hospitalized for over one month were measured at admission and discharge. Changes during inpatient rehabilitation were evaluated in each case. Results : The mean age at admission was 8.2 yrs. The mean length of inpatient stay was 56.2 days. The children included 31 girls and 50 boys. The distributions according to the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS) were Levels Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, and Ⅴ in 3.7%, 8.6%, 28.4%, 32.1%, and 27.2% of patients, respectively. The mean COPM performance score and satisfaction score increased from 3.41 to 5.71 and 3.22 to 5.88 respectively with significant difference. The GMFCS level did not affect the changes in COPM scores. Conclusion : The COPM may work as a useful assessment method for relatively short-term inpatient rehabilitation children since it identifies child-unique problems that are mostly not assessed by conventional methods.