150 – Why do we need to talk about Occupational Therapy?

Welcome to Occupied 3.0. Some of you may have noticed a lack of episodes recently, and for that unannounced break I apologised. But I'm back and I'm inspired to continue bringing you more regular eps and interviews again!

A hot topic every April during OT month. Why does no-one know what we do? I want to look deeper into how this became a problem and what can we do to fix it.

Occupational Therapy Practice Framework: Domain and Process (3rd Edition)". American Journal of Occupational Therapy. 68 (Suppl. 1): S1–S48. March–April 2014. doi:10.5014/ajot.2014.682006

Look after yourself, look after others, and always keep Occupied

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Transcript

0:02  

So many moons ago, I did an episode on occupied about how to talk about occupational therapy. And it remains, to this day, one of the most popular episodes that are out there. There's been a lot of talk recently, around a similar topic. And it tends to be something that comes up pretty much every April every 18 months, surprisingly, in the States. So I thought I'd revisit this topic and try and delve into a little bit more detail so that we have a better understanding of why it's important that we do gain a good professional identity, we do gain confidence in what we do, and we are speaking about the profession in a more consistent manner. Why? Or how do we know this is an issue, I only have to look into a number of ot Facebook groups or Instagram accounts, or particularly my favorite meme pages to see that the complaint of no one knows what we do is still prevalent within the profession. There's been some talk recently about blaming the individual or blaming the profession. And I do want to assure you, I'm not here to blame anyone. But I am here to hopefully get you to see that although it's not an individual's fault, or it's not the professions fault, it is also our responsibility to fix it because no one else is going to fix it for us. So I think it's important that we have a look back at sort of how we got here. And to do that, because we're such a young profession, we have to go right back to the very start. So it's important to know if you don't already that ot was birthed from a group of people from a number of different professions, there were psychologists, or psychiatrists, nurses, and a lot of other professions, I can't read all of them off the top of my head, but other professions are weren't even health related, who all saw this sort of gap in the medical model at the time, there were people slipping through the cracks, and there was things not being done because it didn't fit within that medical model.

2:47  

The overall sort of consensus was that occupational therapy could be a profession that looked more at the complex interrelation of social, economic, and biological reasons for a person's dysfunction, rather than just the medical reason. So it was looking outside the medical model to improve health and well being, even if they weren't exactly the terms used back in the early 1900s. There was early on, and I believe he was one of the founding people of IoT, I can't remember his name off the top of my head. But they came up with four sort of core points for what would become occupational therapy. And those points were that occupation has a positive effect on health and well being.