Substance abuse rehabilitation needs to be guided by well-developed practice model(s)

Although occupational therapy for substance abuse, as a field in psychiatric rehabilitation, has been implemented for over half a century, it still seems underdeveloped. This area of rehabilitation aims to enhance the quality of life of substance abuse rehabilitants and prevent them from relapse.1 It can be achieved by enabling them to identify their meaningful occupations and occupational roles, and supporting them to re-engage in the occupations that they value, which would help empower them to overcome abuse.2 The interventions around the world include brief intervention, motivational strategy, cognitive behavioural therapy, outreach vocational rehabilitation and a community reinforcement approach.3 4 Nevertheless, there seems to be no well-formulated practice model which can denote the uniqueness of these occupational therapy interventions. The practice model in healthcare, by definition, is a schematic description of significant components of concepts or theories in a particular discipline which depicts how the practitioners work to provide the required interventions in order to achieve the expected outcomes.5 It is not uncommon to find that not every specialty of a profession has its practices clearly delineated via practice model(s) derived from the corresponding conceptual framework. In general, even when some clinical guidelines or protocols are available, practitioners may simply follow them without carefully referring to the respective practice model(s), not to say attempting to make some comparisons among various models. Such a situation is even worse for substance abuse rehabilitation where a conceptual framework is generally not well established, which affects the yield of practice model(s). It reflects that the complexity of this subspecialty could make the interventions challenging. And, it may also be related to some practitioners who do not have good clinical reasoning guided by the associated conceptual framework in their daily practices …