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| Picture of Occupational Theraphy |
OCCUPATIONAL THERAPISTS
A career as an Occupational Therapist is both personally and financially rewarding. Occupational Therapists help patients with a wide number of conditions that include developmental disabilities, training patients with permanent disabilities to utilize adaptive equipment, motor skills rehabilitation, repair short term memory loss, improving decision making, as well as creating and implementing rehabilitation plans and evaluating a patient's progress. Basically, Occupational Therapy is a type of therapy that helps people return to their previous occupations.Certainly an Occupational Therapist might prepare a patient to function in a work environment, but the broader focus of OT is on any activity, or occupation, that is meaningful to an individual or necessary to live a full, independent life.
Occupational Therapy allows patients to carry out "the job of living." Occupational therapists are expected to continue their professional education by taking continuing education classes and workshops. In fact, a number of states stipulate continuing education as a requirement of maintaining licensure. Occupational therapists work in a wide variety of areas of the medical profession.
Role:
- To Provide Occupational theraphy for all clients groups including assessments, diagnoses, and treatement plans.
- Evaluating and formulating the client's occupational profile through a variety of functional, behavioral, and stanardized assessments, skilled observation, checklists, histories and interviews.
- Synthesizing evaluation results into a comprehensive written report which reflects strengths and barriers to client's participation in the educational environment, direct program development and guides evidence-based intervention plans to achieve set goals.
- Educating clients, teachers, and family to facilitate skills in areas of occupation as well as health maintenence and safety.
- Documenting occupational theraphy services to ensure accountability of service provision an to meet standards for reimbursement of services as appropriate.
- Providing continuing education and in-services for educational personnel, parents community based service providers.
- Providing fieldwork education and supervision for occupational therapy.
- Prioritizing and scheduling work tasks independently.
- Managing inventory of therapeutic equipment and assessments. and project needs for budget planing.
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| Occupational Therapist with Patient |
They can work in schools, hospitals, children's hospitals, home health, rehabilitation facilities, children's clinics, nursing homes, home care, out-patient care, private practices, health boards, community mental health centers, clinics, halfway houses, groups homes, vocational programs, community action groups, and workers compensation boards.They can also be found working as consultants for businesses, organizations, and governments. Government work can be in the areas of rehabilitation program development, health awareness and programs, disability prevention and management, accessibility, and vocational and health planning. Employment opportunities are expected to increase, especially for therapists who treat the elderly. They are also increasingly taking on more supervisory roles. Changing societal needs have caused an increased demand for Occupational Therapists.