Occupational therapy at Well Life can help you achieve your everyday life goals and make day to day tasks or work easier, inclusive of any conditions you may have. Occupational therapy can adapt your tasks or environment to help maintain independence as well as complete tasks and goals that are most meaningful to you. If you are employed, this may be a DSE (desk screen equipment) or functional capacity assessment.
What is occupation?
Occupation is any task or activity you participate in, like or have to do within your life. This can include anything from brushing your teeth to driving your car or attending a concert or working. ADLs (Activities of Daily Living) are a group of occupations that most people engage with daily.
What is Occupational Therapy (OT)?
Occupational therapy is a profession that takes a holistic or ‘whole person’ approach to their service users and their needs. OT’s consider a persons likes, wants, beliefs as well as external factors such as environment, physical and cognitive abilities and the tasks or ‘occupations’ that a person performs or wishes to perform. With all this information, occupational therapy helps to overcome any difficulties service users have with their daily ‘occupations’.
What conditions can OT help with?
OT can assist with a wide variety of conditions, symptoms or difficulties a person may have. If a condition is affecting a persons daily activities then an OT can assess the situation and the conditions impacting it, in order to help.
OT’s at Well Life are able to assist with physical based conditions as well as any psychological impacts of conditions, such as problems sleeping.
What happens during an occupational therapy assessment?
- There are many occupational therapy assessments that differ greatly.
- Initially you will be greeted by our friendly therapist who will gather information from you regarding what is important to you and any difficulties you are having with everyday tasks. From this information goals can be identified and other assessments may be identified, for example, a kitchen assessment.
- Each assessment will be different, but themes remain similar. For example a kitchen assessment would assess a person’s difficulty in tasks in the kitchen and trial any adaptions that may help.
Registration and Regulation
- Occupational therapists are registered and regulated by the Health and care professions council – HCPC. All Occupational therapists must be registered with the HCPC in order to practice in the UK. Our students on placement are working towards their 1000 hours of clinical practice to meet the registration requirements.
- Occupational therapists are also registered with the Royal College of Occupational Therapy (RCOT), a professional body that provides guidance, standards of practice and codes of conduct. The RCOT provides valuable professional guidance to through their student membership.
- Thank YOU for helping us provide our placement students with the opportunities needed to complete their education. Every OT we help train increases the benefits to the community!
How are students involved?
We are very proud to work with several local universities to provide placement for their physiotherapy and occupational therapy degree students. This allows us to train the therapists of the future, and also give back to our patients through discounted student-led sessions. Practical application of skills allows students to see the theory they have learned get put into action. Working with our therapists and patients also helps them learn invaluable interpersonal skills, and grow in confidence as clinicians. We greatly appreciate the trust that our patients continue to place in us when we offer this learning opportunity.
For more information, take a look at this blog post about a previous student-led clinic!