The Benefits Of Occupational Therapy

What is Occupational Therapy? Not just a few short months ago I could not have fully answered this question. Now I am asking people with no prior knowledge questions about it. Considering that it is still growing and changing I did not expect people to know every detail of the profession, but I did think they would have some knowledge of the job. The answers I got surprised me to say the least.
Interviewing people about this career field was very eye opening. Nobody really knew what occupational therapy was. I interviewed three people ages 17, 24, and 65. When I first asked what they thought occupational therapy was, they really emphasized on the word occupation and related it to the job field. One guess that I got was it was therapy for
Now that I am much more educated in this field and since I have decided this is something I want to pursue, my definition and understanding has broadened. I think there are two types of definitions based on perspectives; the client and the therapist. For the client, the act of going to occupational therapy is for rehabilitation to improve their independence and daily living skills. This can be for tasks like hygiene and dressing, to things like taking care of a beloved pet or being able to do things that are meaningful and valuable. The act of providing occupational therapy is to help all kinds of clients to be able to participate in everyday life, whether it is something they need to do or just something they want to do. To me occupational therapy is such a rewarding field. It is a combination of working with the client, as well as the environment they are in, to make them able to live their everyday lives. From the therapist perspective OT is a job that requires encouragement, creative thinking, being detail oriented, and caring for the client. It is also important to get to know the client enough to understand what is important to them. Being able to improve client’s quality of life is the main goal in this
I think the first steps in educating others about OT is to make sure the entire health field understands the value and benefits of it. If you think about it, usually when someone needs therapy they first encounter someone in the healthcare field that identifies their need for it. If the OT professionals educated people like doctors, nurses, surgeons, and school nurses, they can be proactive in getting the client to understand their specific need for occupational therapy. Next, to make the field more well-known it is important for people to know all the areas where an OT can practice. To begin they can work with children. This is usually to enhance fine motor skills and hand eye coordination. During this age of OT, it is not only benefiting the child, but also the parents. To educate people about this area it would be important for parents to learn about it through their child’s pediatrician or from the school the child attends. For clients in need of rehabilitation after a specific event that causes a setback it would be important for the nursing staff and doctors to be able to recognize the need for OT. For people in the nursing home setting it could be useful for the staff to recognize the need for adaptive equipment. It would also be useful if they could recognize when the environment that they live in may need to be changed due