ABSTRACT
Background: Professional role overlap can result in professional friction or unhealthy professional rivalry. In a bid to curtail this or promote inter-professional understanding, it is pertinent that the roles of these professional stakeholders are well known.
Aim: To compare the occupational therapy and physiotherapy approaches of stroke rehabilitation.
Method: A mixed research study design, which comprises of qualitative (exploratory cross sectional) study design using a questionnaire guide and a qualitative study design (focus group discussion) using a phenomenological model. Participants included the qualitative section involving 3 rounds of focus group discussion with 6-10 discussants each both physically and virtually as may be convenient for the participants and for the quantitative 60 physiotherapists and 30 occupational therapists were purposively sampled. Data collected were anslysed thematically, descriptively and inferentially at a set level of significance of 0.05.
Result: The result for the quantitative showed that 30% of the participants had low level of clinical competence, 43.3% had moderate level of clinical competence, while 26.7% had high level of clinical competence. From the results of the thematic analysis of the qualitative study, two themes emerged from the study: “stroke rehabilitation practices of physiotherapists and occupational therapists” and “inter-professional rivalry”. These two themes highlighted the similarities and differences between the two professional groups in stroke rehabilitation and how these results in inter-professional conflicts.
Conclusion: Age, gender, and profession did not determine the clinical competence of physiotherapists and occupational therapists. Physiotherapists and occupation therapists have similar objectives, goals and challenges in stroke rehabilitation. There is a strong inter-professional rivalry between the physiotherapists and occupational therapists and this results from limited knowledge of the roles and responsibilities of each other in stroke rehabilitation.
