Facilitating participation in occupations and activities is a central goal and method in occupational therapy. Occupational Therapists must understand the factors that constitute and influence human occupation in order to design interventions and consequently occupational- and activity analysis are considered core skills within the profession. The «EVA» activity analysis system is originally a teaching tool used by the Occupational Therapy bachelor programme at Oslo and Akershus University College, to support students in developing skills in activity analysis and to aquire occupational therapy terminology. «EVA» is an acronym for the Norwegian “Ergoterapi Virksomhetsbasert Aktivitetsanalysesystem”, which we have translated as “Occupational therapy occupation based activity analysis system”.
The EVA-system is a work in progress. EVA as a teaching tool has covered the person-environment-occupation with a wide range of analysis forms are currently under review. Students on fieldwork placement are required to document activity-based assessment/intervention and use selected EVA-forms to analyze occupational forms and observe occupational performance. Some years ago fieldwork supervisors expressed interest in using the EVA-system in their clinical work as a way of documenting activity based observations. As a teaching tool EVA had not been validated for clinical us and care should be taken before applying the system in clinical practice. As a responce to this a small group has been established with representatives from the clinical field and the Oslo OT-programme to develop, validate and promote the EVA system as a clinical tool.
The group has completed a study of the clinical utility of using EVA to observe and assess performance skills and presented this at international Conferences. A manual for using EVA as a basis for assessing performance skills and a template for reporting-EVA based observations in electronic journals have been developed.
The Group is currently investigating analysis of occupational forms as a baseline for clinical observation, developing items for a form dor the analysis of body-functions and reviewing the Norwegian terminology for performance skills. Projects being considered are developing new forms for the analysis of environmental factors and using EVA in Occupational diagnosis.
In responce to enquiries from international collegues we will be making parts of the EVA system available in English as through this blog.