Abstracts by keywords: health insurance status
The positive effects of such occupational therapy interventions, which ideally take place in the home environment, were demonstrated by Graff and colleagues in a study in which not only the everyday skills of the patients improved, but also the quality of life of both dementia patients and caring relatives (8, 9). Another area in which occupational therapy plays a central role in treatment and is listed accordingly in the guidelines is rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis and spondyloarthritis (5). Although positive effects of ergotherapeutic measures have been shown for these diseases, there has been a decreasing trend in prescriptions for rheumatism patients in recent years (10). According to Thieme et al., the reasons for this are: presumably in the budgeting of the remedies combined with the fear of recourse claims by the health insurance companies, in the complexity of the prescription of remedies for those insured by the statutory health insurance companies, in the low appreciation and/or supposedly low evidence of physical therapies and in the long time constant until the noticeable onset of effects (10) . The aim of this article was therefore to present the care profile of patients with occupational therapy prescriptions over a 5-year period. For this purpose, in addition to the age structure, the sex ratio, the living space (city/countryside), the insurance status and the diagnoses of the patients were examined.