“Occupational therapy is helping assist people in regaining their daily occupations like bathing or taking care of their house so to promote health, well-being, and participation”. This broad statement describing occupational therapy (OT) was my intended response if someone had asked me what OT was, while we were on an elevator together. However, this basic statement, that was written down only a couple of weeks into the Master of OT Program, does not begin to cover the concepts, such as occupation and occupational performance, that go along with the profession of OT. The concepts of OT help in establishing a framework for students and practitioners to incorporate into their practice. Clients and their well-being are the focus of the OT profession
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Practitioners evaluate how clients perform to tailor the intervention and outcomes to improve or enhance the engagement of the desired occupations. To be a successful OT, one needs to understand the concepts of occupation and occupational performance to help with interventions, and the importance of those concepts to every human, as they are fundamental to helping clients achieve engagement in their chosen occupations, to the best of their abilities.
The word occupation can be misleading but to describe the concept of occupations, the consideration of both context and environment are needed. At the beginning of the semester, I only thought of occupations as what people do in their everyday life. While occupations are activities and tasks, completed to occupy time and typically done daily, the term can be easily misunderstood (Christiansen and Townsend, 2010). …show more content…
The engagement in occupations are different for every client as one may find an occupation such as the leisure participation of volleyball meaningful while another client may not. By understanding that not every client will have the same occupation, OTs can use occupations as both the process and the outcome of occupational therapy intervention for each client (Giles et al., 2013). To effectively begin the intervention process and work towards a reachable outcome, the OT needs to evaluate how their client performs in the current moment. This analysis of occupational performance allows OTs to assess and analyze how a client completes an occupation and what factors of the engagement support or hinder the client’s performance (AOTA, 2014). For example, after observing how a client, with hemiplegia after a stroke, struggles with the occupation of dressing, an OT may find adaptive equipment to support the client’s performance. In the presupposition paper, I mentioned that clients can improve in their occupational performance, but I did not explain how. However, at the end of the semester, I now know that there are ways to grade activities of an occupation up or down to accommodate a client’s performance. Additionally, when defining occupation in the presupposition paper, I did not understand the importance
Practitioners evaluate how clients perform to tailor the intervention and outcomes to improve or enhance the engagement of the desired occupations. To be a successful OT, one needs to understand the concepts of occupation and occupational performance to help with interventions, and the importance of those concepts to every human, as they are fundamental to helping clients achieve engagement in their chosen occupations, to the best of their abilities.
The word occupation can be misleading but to describe the concept of occupations, the consideration of both context and environment are needed. At the beginning of the semester, I only thought of occupations as what people do in their everyday life. While occupations are activities and tasks, completed to occupy time and typically done daily, the term can be easily misunderstood (Christiansen and Townsend, 2010). …show more content…
The engagement in occupations are different for every client as one may find an occupation such as the leisure participation of volleyball meaningful while another client may not. By understanding that not every client will have the same occupation, OTs can use occupations as both the process and the outcome of occupational therapy intervention for each client (Giles et al., 2013). To effectively begin the intervention process and work towards a reachable outcome, the OT needs to evaluate how their client performs in the current moment. This analysis of occupational performance allows OTs to assess and analyze how a client completes an occupation and what factors of the engagement support or hinder the client’s performance (AOTA, 2014). For example, after observing how a client, with hemiplegia after a stroke, struggles with the occupation of dressing, an OT may find adaptive equipment to support the client’s performance. In the presupposition paper, I mentioned that clients can improve in their occupational performance, but I did not explain how. However, at the end of the semester, I now know that there are ways to grade activities of an occupation up or down to accommodate a client’s performance. Additionally, when defining occupation in the presupposition paper, I did not understand the importance