Occupational therapists' self-insight into their referral prioritisation policies for clients with mental health needs.

BACKGROUND/AIM: Obtaining valid accounts of professionals' thinking is dependent upon experts' capacity for self-insight. Self-insight has implications for developing professional decision making, facilitating education and promoting agreement among therapists. The aim of this study was to examine occupational therapists' self-insight into their referral prioritisation policies.

METHODS

A total of 40 occupational therapists individually rated the importance that differing types of referral content had on their prioritisation of referrals. These subjective policies were then correlated with their objective referral prioritisation policies that had been previously statistically derived.

RESULTS

Self-insight was found to be moderate but with wide variation across individuals and across referral information used. Self-insight on cues that were important to the decision was found to be better than on those cues not so important to the decision.

CONCLUSIONS

Occupational therapists have similar levels of self-insight to other professional groups. The 'attention hypothesis' may explain why self-insight varied across referral information used.