Yoga as an Occupational Therapy Intervention for Inpatient Rehabilitation

The purpose of this capstone project was to develop and determine if an adapted and individualized yoga-based program can support and have an impact on patients’ physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and improve patients’ perceptions of recovery at Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital of Henderson. This was a project focused on quality improvement, focused on the ACOTE focus area of clinical program development in which the student developed and tested outcomes of an occupational therapy (OT) program in a clinical setting. The research design was a quality improvement design with pre and post-measures. Five patients participated in the program one to three times during allotted 1:1 OT sessions through convenience and purposive sampling under the supervision of a licensed OT. Quantitative data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel and descriptive statistics. Qualitative data was analyzed using an iterative process and deductive and inductive coding. Quantitative data revealed support for physiological health, a decrease in pain, and improvement in the level of relaxation for the majority of participants. Themes in the data emerged related to the perceived benefits of participating in this program during OT sessions in relation to aspects of health and recovery. This project is significant to the OT profession because it indicates that yoga-based interventions are impactful, safe, and can be used as a tool to incorporate during OT. Yoga may be a beneficial tool to incorporate during OT sessions at this site as it supports aspects of health and recovery and is feasible to incorporate into the current organizational structure. While this project highlights incorporating a yoga-based intervention with a small sample of patients, these findings should not be generalized to other inpatient rehabilitations as this project was aimed at a specific clinical site. More research is needed to explore OT’s role in implementing yoga-based programs and/or interventions in an inpatient rehabilitation setting in order to continue to support the profession’s advancement of incorporating integrative and complementary interventions