Hi! My name is Grant but I go by my hive name Ascenshin and I am a First-Year Occupational Therapy Doctorate Student! I thought it would be great to share what my future profession is on Hive and hopefully teach people about something amazing! I will keep this brief.
Abbreviations:
OT = Occupational Therapy
OTs = Occupational Therapists
AOTA = American Occupational Therapy Association
How do we define Occupation?
Occupations are the activities we want and need to do, which include things like work, school, hobbies, playing, medication management, dressing, making meals, eating, using the restroom, and many more! This is quite all-encompassing but, really, it is practically everything you and I do within a waking day.
Then, what is Occupational Therapy?
Occupational Therapists (OTs) work with the client on the occupations that they decide are meaningful and use occupational activities as the form of therapy. Interventions, treatments to improve the health of the client, are occupation-based, meaning we work on getting individuals better by using occupations. For example, a child's fine motor development is delayed and they struggle with their grasp. A way in which we can improve their grasp is by having them stack blocks! Yes, that is an occupational activity. HOW FUN!
Here are some more examples of how OTs assist people:
- Helping a child with a disability to participate fully in school and social situations
- Providing support to older adults who have cognitive and physical challenges
- help injured individuals gain back skills they need to function for their job or life
Speaking on that last point, when I did my shadowing of an OT practitioner, we saw a patient who was in a car accident. This was a strong man, barrel-chested, and looked like he could take on a bear. Yet, that wasn't the case at the time. His injuries prevented him from using his arms and hands well. For him, it was meaningful to use his hands better, so in order to help him gain back his fine motor skills, we used the occupation of writing and tracing. When he saw that he could at least trace he cried. It's through these activity-based therapies that improvement is made.
There is a fantastic quote from former American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) President, Virginia "Ginny" Stoffel that I feel artfully describes occupational therapy's holistic approach:
I will leave it at that for now.
I want to say that this is a brief answer to what occupational therapy is and what we do. This occupation has much more: realms of expertise, practice settings, and research, which I hope to talk about in future posts.
If you find this interesting, I would be more than happy to share more about Occupational Therapy as I, too, learn more in school and become more proficient! Please upvote, reblog, and comment so I know if you'd like to hear more!
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