Report writing

As with progress notes, report writing is a highly individualised process, taking into account the same considerations and factors listed above.

Key points to remember when writing reports about infants include:

• Be sensitive to the parent’s feelings about the report: often parents are still grieving about the loss of the “perfect baby” and it is therefore important to highlight strengths, capacities and progress as well as identifying areas of difficulty.
• Be cautious about developmental interpretations (e.g. degree of delay) particularly if you have had limited opportunities to observe the infant or limited experience in assessing.
• Degree of developmental delay should be considered in context of the infant’s age and corrected age.
• Be cautious about providing numeric test results which you feel may be an inaccurate reflection of the child’s abilities or irrelevant (e.g. for the child with global developmental delay; what is the purpose in stating results below the first percentile)
• Be clear to distinguish between abilities observed by you and those provided verbally by the parents.
• Wherever possible, relate your comments and interpretations back to the occupational therapy role e.g. play, interaction, self regulation, feeding.
• Use simple parent friendly language.