Honoring Important ‘Helpers’ During Occupational Therapy Month

It’s become the norm that, when a tragedy occurs, the social media machine cranks out content meant to comfort or inspire, with images from the scene and sometimes even a quote about the resilience of the people effected.

When these things happen, we’re reminded of a line credited to the late Fred Rogers, one you’ve probably seen before. He said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” It’s a quote that reminds us that even when something terrible happens or you’re scared of what’s next, someone will always be there to help.

When it comes to rehabilitation therapy, helpers are everywhere. But most people who think of rehab therapists are thinking of physical therapists (PTs). It makes sense—people likely think of needing rehab therapy after car accidents, sports injuries, falls, and even surgery. But occupational therapists (OTs) also perform vital services for those undergoing their treatment, and we want to take some time to highlight the amazing work they do.

Occupational Therapists Are Rehab Therapy Heroes

OTs might get less attention from the general public, but the work they do is no less important or no less complicated. Just like other therapists, OTs help patients return to a state where they can perform activities without pain and return to their daily life. Since we’re focusing on ‘looking for the helpers,’ let’s look at OTs and how they improve lives.

What Do OTs Do?

Occupational therapists focus specifically on how to improve patient’s quality of life. They are focused on tasks of daily living and working, and may work with people of all ages and various ability levels. This may include a young child who has vertigo, an adult employee who suffers a sprained wrist and needs to recover their ability to type, wash dishes, and clean, or an older person recovering from a hip replacement surgery.

OTs also help with neurological conditions that may affect balance, stability, and fine motor function. They can also assist with managing—and hopefully improving—chronic pain. The goals of occupational therapy will be very tailored to the individual, focused on making sure that they are able to complete the tasks they would like to be able to do successfully. This may mean a different level of ability for the same task between two different individuals.

OTs work in all kinds of settings, from hospitals to private practice to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), which means anywhere you’re looking for helpers, you’ll find occupational therapists.  Because of the wide range of patients and care provided, occupational therapists have a variety of patients they can treat in any of these settings.

Key Activities for OTs

We’ve already mentioned some of the key functions OTs perform, but let’s dig in even more.

Neurological Conditions

One area of OT practice that is not often discussed is treatment of neurological conditions. Because these conditions can cause damage to the nervous system, they can affect many aspects of daily life, as well as cause symptoms like dizziness, nausea, unsteadiness, and more.

There are many techniques occupational therapists might employ to treat these symptoms, including things like gait training, vestibular rehabilitation therapy, balance exercises, and more. This therapy may be temporary, but it also may be something a patient continues to do long term.

Long-term therapy might work for patients with conditions like autism or cerebral palsy, both of which are conditions that the patient will be living with for their whole lives. Patients recovering from traumatic brain injury or stroke might need occupational therapy for a shorter period of time, until such a point that patients’ have reached their rehabilitation goals.

Chronic Pain

Chronic pain management is another issue often treated on an on-going basis by occupational therapists. Since OT can improve range of motion, flexibility, and strength in performing activities of daily living, it can be a very helpful tool in managing and treating chronic pain, regardless of the cause.

Surgical Recovery

Much like physical therapy is often helpful to regain functionality after surgery, so can be occupational therapy. With its focus on improving habitual activities and improving everyday life, this can be a crucial step in not only physical recovery, but mental wellbeing, too.

Recovery, from, say, hip replacement surgery, can include things like relearning how to walk and improving range of motion at the joint, but it can also include balance and stability work, which can fall under an OTs purview. These may seem like small improvements in comparison, but they can make a huge difference in quality of life.

Injury Recovery

Much like surgical recovery, injury recovery often requires both PT and OT. From something like a spinal cord injury, occupational therapy might include working on eating, dressing, grooming, bathing, bladder control, wheelchair use, gait training, and/or stair climbing.

For more minor injuries, like those that may be related to a sport, occupational therapy might include practice in similar movement patterns or balance. Depending on the severity of the injury and the patient’s individual goals, return to activities after an injury can look different for everyone and can be met at different thresholds.

Fine Motor Skills

There are whole subfields of occupational therapy dedicated to improving fine motor skills, like hand therapy. Fine motor skills can be impacted by any number of the above conditions, from stroke to car accident injury to shoulder surgery, though they’re often an area of OT that children receive. For example, exercises to improve fine motor skills for children might include using clothespins, tying shoelaces, doing mazes and puzzles, and using tweezers and tongs.

Why Are Occupational Therapists So Important?

Physical therapists focus on gross motor functions, restoring strength and mobility after an injury or emergency. Speech-language pathologists treat conditions that manage conditions that make things like speaking and swallowing difficult. There’s a lot of overlap between these three professions, and in some cases, all three might even treat the same patient for different issues. However, they each provide their own individual value to their patients.

Occupational therapists are the key to quality of life. So many of the activities that their therapy improves is focused on making sure patients are able to enjoy the lives they have, not just get satisfactorily get through them. After a surgery on your hand, OTs would handle therapy that would return your finger dexterity and grip strength by focusing on activities like doing dishes, buttoning shirts, tying shoelaces, and more. Without occupational therapists, these activities might still be quite uncomfortable.

OTs are particularly and uniquely helpful to cases where those activities remain unmanageable for the patient, such as where their patients:

• Have regained most of their strength back, but still need to hone their mobility or motor skills
• Manage long-term conditions or chronic pain that affects fine motor skills
• Have a neurological condition requiring neuromuscular re-education
• Want to increase independence while managing conditions that make activities of daily living difficult

Without occupational therapy, many of these patients might fall short of their ultimate rehab therapy goals.

How to Best Support Occupational Therapists

So now that we know what OTs do and why it’s so crucial for patients to have access to occupational therapists, how do practices support occupational therapists?

There are a few easy measures to take, including:

• Having enough OTs on staff to handle the patient load
• Offering access to continuing education credits
• Highlighting specialization and certification options for advanced concentrations
• Ensuring compensation is fair and competitive
• Considering implementing value-based care
• Stocking tools and equipment specific to occupational therapy, like hand therapy tools
• Offering documentation tools that offer fields specific or customizable fields for OT

Occupational therapists don’t need anything extraordinary, just an understanding of the functions they perform and the courtesy of taking those functions into consideration when making decisions for the clinic.

Look for the Occupational Therapy Heroes

When times are tough, it’s always a good idea to focus on the positivity around you. It’s helpful to find these special people who help and honor them in your own way. It’s in this spirit that we at Net Health would like to recognize this group of people who we see as true helpers in our world – people who step in when the chips are down to help individuals reclaim their lives during and after injury, illness, or disability: occupational therapists.

We’re now in the middle of Occupational Therapy Month, so we feel it’s high time to honor all occupational therapists and occupational therapy assistants (OTAs) who make such a difference in people’s lives physically, physiologically, emotionally, and socially.

They work with patients of all ages and abilities to achieve their functional goals; function at the highest levels possible; concentrate on what matters most to them; maintain or rebuild their independence; and participate in everyday life activities.

Because not all tragedies are in the news. And yet, every one of them is personal for those that are affected by it. These effects can be unique to each situation and make a large difference in how those impacted feel about it and want to heal.

For those personal tragedies create functional problems for patients, occupational therapists are there to help them develop, recover, improve and maintain not just the skills they need for daily living, but the skills they need to make life worth living. Look for those helpers, the occupational therapists, in times of need.