About Occupational Therapy

Occupational therapy and leisure and health are two very interrelated professions. Occupational therapists focus on enabling people's full participation in everyday life. Leisure and health professionals also enable participation, but their focus is on health and well being through leisure. Both professions develop programs in response to each client's unique needs and situation by looking at the whole person, their environment and what that person wants to do and then working closely with the client to achieve this.

Occupational Therapy

Sometimes people's freedom to participate as fully as they would like in the activities that are meaningful to them is restricted. This may be due to injury or illness. At other times, the activity may be too complex or demanding. Often, it is the environment that 'disables' people, including the built environment, social attitudes and assumptions, or public policies and institutional practice. Whatever the setting or role, occupational therapists help to overcome these barriers and create opportunities for a fuller life.

Occupational therapists believe there has to be a 'good fit' between the person, the environment and the activity, i.e. the occupation. A wide range of strategies to achieve this are utilised, and some of the basic skills that occupational therapists need to assist their clients include:

• assessing their client's performance and participation in meaningful life roles and activities
• assessing biomechanical, sensorimotor, cognitive and psychosocial functioning
• applied activity analysis
• systematic instruction
• analysis of the built and natural environments, and
• the prescription of therapeutic activity, environmental modifications and equipment/aids to independent living.

Occupational therapists work in many different settings and roles, and the breath of the field allows you to change careers a number of times while remaining in the same profession. Some practitioners work with clients in hospitals, the home, school, work and/or other community settings. Other occupational therapists are researchers, scholars, managers, policy makers or advocates.

Leisure and Health

Leisure and Health focuses on health and well being through leisure and recreation and sees this as a means to deliver health and well-being outcomes to individual lives as well as balance to an often unbalanced world. Leisure has the power to recreate, rejuvenate and empower people at an individual and societal level. The leisure professional can create, manage and evaluate leisure environments within a range of industry settings including day and vacation care centres, youth and community centres, outdoor recreation programs, resorts and camps, local councils, rehabilitation units, psychiatric hospitals, community mental health services, residential services for the aged, disability services, children's hospitals, correctional facilities, and policy bodies