Celebrating Occupational Therapy Week 2022

This week marks Occupational Therapy Week 2022. This year, OT week runs from 24-30 October with World Occupational Therapy Day being held on 27 October 2022. The theme for 2022 is “What OT means to me” and provides OTs, their clients, and industry partners with the opportunity to reflect on occupational therapy from their personal perspective.

Let's start with the basics......What is OT?

Occupational therapy (OT) is a branch of health care that helps people of all ages who have physical, sensory, or cognitive problems. OT can help them regain independence in all areas of their lives.

Occupational therapists focus on promoting health and wellbeing by enabling people to participate in the everyday occupations of life, such as self-care activities including showering, dressing, preparing food; productive activities such as education, work, volunteering and caring for others; and leisure/social activities, such as being part of a community group, engaging in a hobby, and being part of a friendship group.

Why would my child need to see an OT?

Occupational Therapists cover a lot of areas and while all of these areas may seem different, OTs always circle back to promoting functional independence in any given area. OT's may be of benefit to your child to address:

Gross and Fine Motor Skills
Handwriting, pencil grip and tabletop activities
Sensory Processing and Emotional Regulation
Attention, Concentration and other Executive Functioning skills
Activities of Daily Living - dressing, eating, sleeping, toileting etc.
Adaptive equipment and modified tools

What does an OT therapy session look like?

Fun! Here at SSTS, our OT's make sure every session is as enjoyable and meaningful for our clients as we can make them! No session looks the same, we aim to make sure we are targeting your child's goals without them even knowing it!

OT sessions can be completed at home, school, in the community or in one of our

clinics. We aim to make sure children are able to generalise the skills they learn in their OT sessions into the real world, promoting functional independence no matter what the goal is.

OT Assessment sessions will also look different depending on the area being assessed. At times, the assessment may be a discussion with the care givers rather than a 1:1 session with the child, this allows us to collect information and listen to the experts of the child - that's you! Other times, the child will go through a series of activities and tasks but again, we try to make it as fun as possible!