The landscape of healthcare provision in England is changing. The NHS is undergoing major transformation at a time of limited public spending. These changes bring an increased requirement for all healthcare services to prove their effectiveness or risk not being re-commissioned.

Mental health Occupational Therapy (OT) services are not exempt from these reforms. The College of Occupational Therapists has identified research into OT treatment for people with mental health problems and the development of valid and reliable outcome measures as priorities for research .

Critical analysis of other primary research studies revealed that as plethora of outcome measures were being used within mental health. Many of the outcome measurement tools selected were inappropriate to the intervention being measured. This often resulted in questionable findings. Studies that selected proven occupation based outcome measures were able to relate findings more directly to OT interventions.

This study was conducted across two NHS adult in-patient mental health services within and NHS Foundation Trust in England. The OT service in this study implements the Vona du Toit Model of Creative Ability and the Activity Participation Outcome Measure (APOM) as its chosen model of practice and associated outcome measure.

The aim of this research was to identify any trends, correlations and associations following retrospective analysis of APOM data and report these findings in relation to OT intervention. This descriptive research study adopted and explorative approach. A convenience sample of 194 adults admitted to either hospital during 2012 were identified and included for quantitative analysis.

The key findings demonstrated that the majority of participants improved significantly across all of the APOM's occupational performance domains over the course of an admission.  Admissions were found to be significantly different between the two hospitals, but the number of treatments received and mean improvement in outcome scores were very similar and demonstrated a high degree of consistency across the OT service. A trend between admission length and the number of OT group treatments received was discovered. This identified that those attending the less OT group treatments demonstrated the smallest changes in post-treatment APOM scores. The number of OT treatments received was also discovered to have the greatest impact on changes in APOM scores when compared to length of admission, diagnosis, age, gender and site of treatment.

The choice of research methodology meant that causality couldn’t be inferred. The OT service can, however, claim to be part of an effective treatment approach to in-patient mental  health care within the NHS Foundation Trust.