Occupational Therapists help patients return to everyday life
Occupational Therapists (OTs) evaluate and assess a client’s ability to perform certain activities in their environment, such as their home. They are vital catalysts for aiding individuals with developing coping strategies that also help them manage their mental health issues, improving their confidence and ability to do their activities of daily living. Children and youth, various age groups of adults, people with chronic episodic conditions, workplace injuries and those with mental health issues or mental illnesses benefit on multiple levels when working with an OT.
“Our title of Occupational Therapists often makes people automatically think about jobs, which is true. That’s a huge role for Occupational Therapy. However, our work is way broader than that,” said Coralie Lennea, Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Society Of Occupational Therapists (SSOT).
When somebody suffers an injury or illness that makes it difficult for them to return to their job, OTs will work with that individual to explore the various areas of the individual’s life that are affected. They assess what the physical and mental demands of the job are to adapt the job to the individual or find another suitable job that enables the individual to return to work.
With regards to mental health, OTs aid with designing and building both individual and group programs and activities that encourage participation.
“Mental health is something we want to talk about, as the services are really limited,” said Lennea. “There’s a real shortage and yet, mental health is one of the strategic plan goals for Saskatchewan Health. It’s one of the target populations and the services right now with Occupational Therapy are very low.”
Through assessing all the basic self-care activities of daily life - everything from dressing to eating to bathing - an OT can implement problem solving that generates an improvement in that individual’s quality of life on the path to healing. All activities that the individual participates in - from leisure or vocational activities - are part of the assessment.
For instance, a child’s occupation is to attend school and play in order to develop. The biggest occupation for kids is that they also need to know how to be successful at school while developing coping strategies and healthy ways to deal with various stressors.
“We need to look at the mental health and coping strategies with children. So, Occupational Therapists are doing a lot of work in Saskatchewan school divisions with helping children be successful in school,” said Lennea.
Increasingly, OTs are becoming consultants to teachers. They meet with the teachers, find out what is going on with certain children in certain classrooms and provide strategies to help the children become more successful.
“There’s a huge shortage of OTs, and especially in the rural centers, it is very hard to recruit and retain OTs when there are various other job opportunities available,” said Lennea.
Adults or teenagers can be referred to an OT by a family physician, other healthcare professional or family member after a disability, illness or disease occurs. If somebody is still in their home and accessing home care, such as seniors, then home care might recommend an OT.
In addition, if an individual has had a motor vehicle accident and they’re in the hospital with some significant trauma, there’s a level of OT that starts in acute care before moving into rehab or they might be discharged home and have a therapist follow up with them in the community.
There are also third party payers, like insurance companies such as SGI and WCB. For injuries in motor vehicle or in the work place, both have OTs that they contract to work with the injured party. Overall, however, there is a shortage of OTs.
“The shortage of OTs documented from the CIHI - which is the Canadian Institute of Health Information - data reports that the national average for Canada is 39 OTs for every 100,000 people in the population across Canada. In Saskatchewan, we have only 28 OTs for every 100,000 people,” said Lennea.
“We’ve been sending CIHI data since 2005,” said Lennea. “We are significantly below the national average and that means two big things. First, Saskatchewan has significant lower access to Occupational Therapists than any other province in Canada. Second, the impact to that is our Saskatchewan residents don’t even know what they are missing.”
The average person does not know what Occupational Therapy is or whether they should be receiving it.
“On top of that, many health professionals haven’t had a chance to work with many OTs and don’t even realize that they could be referring people to OTs. So if a family doctor hasn’t had a lot of experience with an OT, they won’t think about referring people to an OT. It becomes a bit of a spinning cycle – you don’t get more OT services if you never ask for them.”
“On the other hand,” said Lennea, “why would you refer to a service that your clients can’t get because there is not enough therapists? It’s a catch 22 – that’s a dilemma we face a lot.”