Introduction: Cancer rates are gradually growing and have almost doubled in the last twenty years. Treatment save lives of many patients, but later they face physical and psychosocial complications, which prevent them from fully integrating to daily life. Cancer rehabilitation, in which occupational therapy has an important role, also helps to increase percentage of survivors. Purpose: The purpose of this diploma work is to determine how the role of occupational therapy in the treatment of adult oncology patients is defined in the literature. Methods: In the diploma work we use the method of theoretical review of foreign literature. Keywords used in the search were adult, cancer OR oncology and occupational therap* alone or in combination. The review took place between 25th December and 5th April 2021. The articles were found using search engines of Digital library of University of Ljubljana, Google Scholar and PubMed. Researches in English language included in the review were qualitative and quantitative, published between 2000 and 2020, which included occupational therapy treatment of adult oncology patients. Results: In the final qualitative synthesis we included eight articles that met all the inclusion criteria. Qualitative synthesis of six qualitative and two quantitative researches gave two content categories: improving the qualitive of life and involvement in occupations and cooperation. Discussion and conclusion: Occupational therapist enables an individual patient to achieve maximum functional performance, both physically and psychologically regardless of his or her life expectancy. Occupational therapist has an important role in managing the symptoms that occur as a result of illness or treatment. He also takes part in the inclusion of the patient in the vocational rehabilitation program. It is important that occupational therapist includes the performance of physical activities in the treatment, because it has been found out that rehabilitation is thus more successful. Occupational therapy interventions improves quality of life of oncology patients in all phases - during or after treatment and also in the survivor phase. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based literature on the research topic. The findings of the diploma can be helpful for occupational therapists who work with patients facing similar problems.
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