Pediatric Occupational Therapy Essay

A main focus of pediatric occupational therapists is the improvement of motor skills. Developing these skills with pediatric patients helps them with staying on task and feeling comfortable with their place in space. This helps with attention, balance, and interaction with the world and other people. There are a variety of ways to help children who have motor skill problems improve. First, therapists have to establish a baseline for where a child’s motor skills currently are. From there, the techniques for treatment can be as unqiue and individualized as the child themselves. In my research of motor skill testing, I came across three articles that all aimed to help children improve their motor skills. Pergami, Seemaladinne, and Billings’ (2012)
McGinnis (2013) conducted a specialized study of three autistic children to record the effects of deep pressure techniques on their motor skills. Occupational therapists can gain specific and useful methods to use with their pediatric patients by reading these three articles that all had small sample sizes, dealt with the improvement of motor functioning, and had positive outcomes. Using small sample sizes, all three articles were able to focus on the consequences and outcomes for very individualized diagnoses. Though all the data in each article was gathered from narrow samples, the information is valuable due to its individualized nature. Moulton and Olsen (2004) gathered “a convenience sample of 51 pediatric occupational therapists at the 1999 Annual Conference of the American Occupational Therapy Association” (p. 54). While this is a small sample, the individual participants can be considered experts in the pediatric side of occupational therapy, making them reputable. They asked each therapist about their particular patients, breaking them down by diagnosis and by how many
For example, McGinnis (2013) looks specifically at children who have Autism Spectrum Disorders and how the application of deep pressure affects them. Knowing how these very specific cases played out will help me better predict how children who have similar disorders will react if deep pressure techniques are employed with them. If I end up working with any children on the spectrum, I may be able to use some of the techniques for deep pressure talked about in this study. Moulton and Olson (2004) also break down the results of using weighted vests by the diagnosis of the children therapists worked with. Again, this breakdown will help me in the future to predict if and how a child will respond to a weighted vest based on their diagnosis. Pergami, Seemaladinne, and Billings (2012) review of the computer based application for motor skill testing is just one example of a diagnostic tool I could use in my future career. Whether it be paper-based, a real world test of skills, or a computer based application such as theirs, occupational therapists frequently run tests to establish a baseline on a variety of skills. They also retest these skills frequently to assess if and what kind of progress their patients are making. If a computer based test specific to occupational therapy and motor functionality does not already occur, I have no doubt that it will become a