College of Health and Life Science

Occupational Therapy & Community Nursing Division

MSc Pre-registration Occupational Therapy Year 1

Writing Exercise: Formative Essay

Using the Brunel Library resources, find, read and critically appraise the following article

Pilegaard MS, la Cour K, Oestergaard LG, Johnsen AT, Lindahl-Jacobsen L, Højris I, Brandt A (2018) The ‘Cancer Home-Life Intervention’: A randomised controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of an occupational therapy–based intervention in people with advanced cancer. Palliative Medicine 32(4): 744-756.

Writing Exercise

Pilegaard and colleagues present the results of a randomised controlled trial of an occupational therapy intervention for patients with advanced cancer. They find no evidence of its effectiveness on any of the outcomes measured. Despite this finding, they argue against drawing a ‘hasty conclusion that OT-based interventions have no effect in people with advanced cancer.’

Your task is to write a letter to the editor of Palliative Medicine either in support of the authors’ claim that we should not dismiss the value of occupational therapy for people with advanced cancer, or arguing against this position. Use your critical appraisal (you will learn about this in OT5703 seminars) of the strengths and weakness of the research, and your evaluation of the author’s arguments in the Discussion section of the paper to support your position.

Note that Palliative Medicine is an international journal with a multi-professional readership that includes doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists and palliative care academics – only a small minority of its readers will be occupational therapists. It is the highest ranked journal in the field of palliative care (Impact Factor 3.7).

Format

Your letter must follow the Palliative Medicine author guidelines for ‘Letters to the Editors’ which you can find here: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/journal/palliative-medicine#submission-guidelines.

• Letters should not exceed 500 words
• Maximum number of references: 5
• Must be word processed with double line spacing and page numbers
• The font type/size should be Arial 12 point
• Use the Harvard reference style adopted by Brunel University: http://libguides.brunel.ac.uk/referencing
• Header must contain your student number and your name

Resources

There are many helpful sources of information on appraisal and critical writing, for example the CASP tools (https://casp-uk.net/casp-tools-checklists/) and Trisha Greenhalgh’s book ‘How to Read a Paper’ (in the library). You might find this guideline on article critique useful: http://owll.massey.ac.nz/assignment-types/article-critique.php – not all of it will be directly relevant to this short piece of work, but the principles it outlines are sound.

Information for Submission

Your Personal Academic Tutor will be marking this.  You can either print your essay and hand it in or your can email you tutor and ask them if they wouldn’t like to receive it electronically via email.

If you submit a hardcopy you can bring it to the Taught Programmes Office (TPO) on the first floor of the Mary Seacole Building

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Information on Feedback & Writing Workshops:

You have been scheduled to attend a workshop on writing with Dr Anne Wilson who is a Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Consultant Fellow. This has been arranged for Wednesday afternoon in Week 2.  You will have a second session in Week 9 which will help you learn about how to apply feedback from your formative essay in preparation for writing your first essay.  Mellissa Prunty (Year Lead) will email you about the schedule for these sessions.