Before embarking on any kind of career, it’s important to know exactly what’s involved with your line of work. Many professions are well known by prospective students and others by the time they are children, so no further information is really needed. But for something like occupational therapy, people generally don’t know that much about the field or what to expect, and there are also a number of misconceptions that need to be clarified. So if you’re interested in occupational therapy but need to become more informed, used the following guide to start filling in the gaps.
The scope of work for an occupational therapist is extremely wide, although it’s also likely that eventually in your career you will become more honed in to work with a specific population or a group of individuals with specific types of problems that need to be addressed. That being said, the broad overview of occupational therapy is that you work with patients to improve their ability to handle and perform tasks in their daily lives, whether that’s at home or whether that is something to be used in the workplace.
Occupational therapists work with all kinds of patients. The list includes those with physical disabilities, mental disabilities, emotional disabilities and developmental disabilities. A patient can be a child who needs to acquire new schools in order to make it through school, or it could be a senior citizen who needs ways to adapt to physical changes in their bodies which have left them impaired, and just about anybody in between.
For some patients, the tasks at hand will be to learn a skill, or an ability, or to reach a certain stage of improvement over a current condition. You might need to help someone recover from a debilitating injury or setback of another kind, develop a new skill or improve basic motor functions, or more. But for patients with permanent disabilities or injuries, the occupational therapist then needs to find ways for the patient to adapt to their condition, and work around the issues which are holding them back.
Altogether, the goal for an occupational therapist with just about any client will be to help them have independent and productive lives that the can be satisfied and happy with. It can be accomplished in many different ways, and as mentioned, the scope can be huge in terms of who you’re working with, what you’re trying to help them with, what your goals are, and more.
So what does an occupational therapist do? OT’s help patients live better lives, get past problems, learn new skills, adapt to disabilities, and function as normally as possible. Whether it’s improving communication, making up for a developmental disability, honing specific skills for the workplace or school, rehabbing a physical debilitation or anything else. It’s a rewarding career which allows you to constantly be making a positive difference in the lives of patients, and that’s one of the main reasons why people are so drawn to the profession.