"Gray Area" in Inpatient Rehabilitation OT

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 clients but simply did not have the time they probably wished they had to do so.  Maybe with time, there will be less arm bikes and bicep curls and more occupation-based tasks like playing cards or practicing a golf swing.  I say all of this to bring light to the importance of occupational performance of doing tasks that have a purpose to someone versus exercise to improve strength that may or may not be understood by clients.