What does an Occupational Therapist do?

[Title card: What does an Occupational Therapist do?]

My name is Lauren James and I'm an Occupational Therapist. I'm currently working for NRS [Healthcare].

So, occupational therapy can often be confused for lots of different other roles like physiotherapy, Occupational Health, but it's its very own, very unique role.

At the heart of OT, we are therapists who work with a variety of different clients with a variety of different conditions, adults and children. And we really work with them to allow them to achieve goals, which are meaningful and personable to them. As OTs we really focus on activities where the - which are day to day. So, activities which we all take for granted and activities we don't generally really think about, but for our clients those activities - when they do lose that independence from a certain condition, maybe its a physical condition, a mental health condition, cognitive condition. When they do lose that ability to be able to carry out those activities, it has such a detrimental impact on them, so as a therapist we will really work with our clients to focus on improving their ability to complete those tasks.

So, for us, occupational therapy as a whole starts in a kind of format to many other health professionals, where we will do our assessment of our clients needs. And this can be based on their physical ability, any falls history, cognitive ability. We will look at their environment as well, so often we will visit the property that the client's living at currently. We will look around, we will look at the space, look at the layout. We will look at what equipment they've also got in place at the moment. Again, this gives us a really nice picture of where our client's at at the moment, what current level of independence they're at, and also what's going to be realistic that we can then achieve with our clients.

We also do observational assessments. So, what we might do with our clients, say for example if they really want to get back into cooking but because of their condition they're just not able to do that at the moment, we will observe that client doing a small cooking task. We will then be able to break down that task, something we call task analysis, which as OTs we absolutely love because it means we can break down that task into lots of different components and really analyse where that client is having difficulties with. So, we will observe the client doing that task and from there will be able to offer some advice and support. We might be able to provide some aids and adaptations for them to try and see if that'll improve the way they're completing the task. We might be able to modify the task and give the clients lots of different techniques of how they might improve their ability to complete it.

I suppose a really big part of the job - and I suppose it's one of my favourite parts of the job actually - is working with the prescribers answering all their questions and supporting them with any queries they've got about equipment, be that contract equipment, recycled equipment, or if they've just got any - you know, they just need a bit of a chat regarding a particular case, we're always there on hand - email, telephone - whenever they want to. And I think that's one of the things I really like best is just helping those prescribers.

I'd say occupational therapy as a whole is quite a unique career, in the fact that there's so many different areas that you can go into. A lot of people would think oh occupational therapy - you know, working in hospital in an acute setting - even if you did know what occupational therapy was, often people don't. But actually there's so many areas you can go into, you know you've got hand therapy, being a wheelchair therapist, rehabilitation, working within mental health, all those areas just make it so diverse, so when you actually go in and train to be an occupational therapist, you're not limited at all to the role. There's such a variety to go into and you can learn such a vast, different amount of knowledge within each area, but also kind of keeping those same OT skills. So I think for anybody who wants a bit of variety in a career, it's a really good place to start.

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