Foundations of Occupation Centered Practice

Mandy Chamberlain begins her discussion about home health with Monika Lukasiewicz by hearing how Monika was first exposed to OT through a personality test and how she loved that OT is both a science and an art.  She loves the creativity of home health OT and it has allowed her to practice in the ways that she wants to because she gets to be in people's environments and really maximize her skills.  For example, when assisting a client with her independents shower skills, she said it is very beneficial to see her actual shower setting and make modifications based off of her individual needs in that shower.  She thinks where home health shines is that they get to see the big functional picture for people while being in their environment and getting a special look at safety i.e. fall prevention, how are they taking their meds, performing ADLs.  Monika described a typical day as an OT in home health as most mornings she goes to the office to make phone calls and/or follow...

While observing as an OT school applicant in the inpatient rehabilitation of a prominent hospital in my home town, two key things that stuck out to me were the repetitive uses of exercises and seeing many clients with a lack of motivation to perform the tasks.  Now that I've been in OT school for nearly four months, I know that these things could be correlated with the correlation being that the clients weren't given therapeutic exercises or preparatory methods that had meaning to them.  Very often I observed clients who either didn't want to go to therapy or got to therapy and were dazing off or skipping through the exercises just so they could leave.  While there were not limited resources at the hospital, case load from day to day on the OTs was at an extreme high.  On a typical day, every OT would have a client every 30 minutes and very often have two at a time during a session.  I know that the OTs wished they could do more meaningful activities with their ...