Advocacy is very important for OTs because by promoting and raising awareness for the profession to other health care practitioners, our clients, and the public, we can reveal how beneficial occupational therapy is in healthcare. One way OTs can raise awareness includes that of advocating through legislative action. By targeting federal or state legislation, OTs can hopefully block or amend bills that may limit the profession’s scope of practice and/or decrease the amount of reimbursement at a more local level. For instance, in our previous class, Dr. Dillon discussed how the OOTA successfully joined with the physicians’ organization of Ohio to prevent the passage of a bill that would have encroached on both professions’ scope of practice.
