Occupational Therapy Intervention
What Is Occupational Therapy?
- Occupational therapy is a client-centred health profession concerned with promoting health and well being through occupation. The primary goal of occupational therapy is to enable people to participate in the activities of everyday life (World Federation of Occupational Therapists, 2010).
- Occupational therapy helps people to do the everyday things that they want to do and need to do when faced with illness, injury, and disability or challenging life events.
- For children, we assess areas of potential difficulty and assist children in reaching their maximum potential by facilitating achievement of developmental milestones and progressing their skills.
What Is Occupation?
- Occupations are the ordinary and familiar things that people do every day – anything that occupies a person’s time.
- The main categories of occupation include productivity, self-care, play and leisure.
Main Occupations Of Childhood
- Productivity – school/academics, writing, reading, learning etc.
- Self-care – grooming, brushing teeth, washing, feeding, dressing etc
- Leisure – playing with others, social interaction, hobbies, sports etc
What Can Impact A Child’s Occupational Performance?
- Sensory processing
- Motor control and coordination
- Play skills
- Praxis (ideation)
- Coping skills (ability to deal with change)
Some Indicators That Occupational Therapy May Be Warranted:
- Poor attention or concentration
- Child has trouble being still and fidgets a lot/ child seems to disengage or “switch off” after a while
- Decreased fine motor skills and poor handwriting
- Clumsy, disorganised or forgetful
- Trouble interacting with peers or authority figures appropriately
- Difficulty controlling behaviour and emotional responses
- Difficulty carrying out activities of daily living
What Can You Expect From Our Service?
- Our Occupational Therapy services are tailored to meet each client’s needs depending on their condition, prognosis, presenting problems, reason for referral and other client/family related factors. Based on these factors, the occupational therapist will select the most appropriate clinical approaches and therapy duration.
- Over the first number of sessions the therapist will explore current abilities and identify underlying reasons for referral or presenting problems. We develop and implement an intervention program that is thoroughly discussed with the client/caregivers/parents to achieve our clinical outcomes.
- Our individual sessions consist of 50 minutes of direct service with the child and 10 minutes of feedback with the caregiver.
- Benefits of occupational therapy can include improved attention, organisation, behaviour, sensory processing, motor coordination, sequencing, fine motor skills and independence in activities of daily living.