Introduction: In the last years, depression is becoming one of the most common disorders in the developed world that can affect everyone of us. Because of its frequency and symptoms, depression became one of the biggest problems of our society. Most of the time, clients that are suffering from depression have troubles with occupational participation and occupational performance. In order to help them, we first have to collect as much information about them as possible. We can do that by using different assessment tools. Purpose: To present the importance of occupation-centered evaluation in occupational therapy and to study assessment tools used in clients with depression. Methods: We used the literature review approach. Literature was searched with Google Scholar, COBBIS, Otseeker and the University of Ljubljana Digital Library, which allows access to ScienceDirect, Cochrane Library, PubMed and Whiley Online Library databases. We used scientific research articles which were written in English, published after 2010 and those where full text was accessible. Articles had to report about research done in the field of occupation-centered occupational therapy assessment tools used in clients with mental health disorders (depression had to be included) and study their use and psychometric properties. 12 such articles were included in the final analysis. Results: Most used occupational therapy assessment tools used in clients with depression are: Canadian Occupational Performance Measure, Volitional Questionnaire, Model of Human Occupation Screening Tool and Occupational Self Assessment. All of these occupational therapy assessment tools are standardised, occupation-centered, reliable, valid and suitable for measuring the success of the occupational therapy intervention. Discussion and conclusion: Evaluation in occupational therapy is a very important part of the intervention. It is important for the occupational therapists to have a lot of knowledge about the assessment tools, so they can choose which one will they use with different clients. Use of occupational therapy assessment tools is very important, because this way occupational therapists can get all of the needed information about clients for planning further intervention. Occupational therapists all over the world strive to use reliable and valid occupation-centered assessment tools, because with the results they can explain and support with evidence the decisions they made while planning the intervention.
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