Application of soap assessment note to rehabilitation therapy teaching

BACKGROUND: In rehabilitation therapy teaching, it is crucial to cultivate professional knowledge and clinical skills of rehabilitation therapy for students. SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) is the international most commonly used and accepted in the medical records of problem oriented method. SOAP is used to develop clinical thinking ability, improve analysis, judgment and the ability of solving clinical problem for students. OBJECTIVE: To retrospectively analyze the composition, teaching benefit and problems of SOAP in China. METHODS: Published articles about SOAP note were searched from PubMed, Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and the articles were retrieved from database building to September 2014. The key words were “SOAP note, rehabilitation, teaching” in Chinese and English. We excluded the repetitive researches. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: After screening, we included 20 articles in the review. SOAP note was helpful to promote students’ independent thinking, strengthened the standardization of the records, rehabilitation treatment, and developed the students’ clinical thinking and the ability to deal with the problem. SOAP note has several challenges in the rehabilitation teaching, however, with the popularity of SOAP teaching concept, and deep research and gradual generalization of SOAP teaching methods, SOAP has a wide application prospect for the rehabilitation education in China.