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Occupational therapists use self-care and work to increase independent function and prevent disability. Information on this job.
Occupational therapists are not, as many people think, nurses. Their profession aims at helping people live as comfortably as possible in their own personal space. Occupational therapy is therefore the use of self-care and work to increase independent function and prevent disability. Such people can work in lots of different places and not just the hospital. They coordinate the work of doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and others but there’s still a basic difference between their profession and that one of the nurse.
People depend on the nurse’s help to eat, move and wash, whereas an occupational therapist does the complete opposite thing: he or she helps patients learn how to eat, walk with the help of a wheelchair or move on their own, in their very own environment. They also help people develop different hobbies in order to make their life more interesting and creative. After the acute treatment of an illness, patients need on all occasions to adapt to their new reality. This is where the occupational therapist’s services come in handy.
Therefore it is very important for them to study their patients carefully because this job is all about what the patient really wants. There have been situations when an occupational therapist would teach his patient how to peel potatoes, only to find out that the patient never ate potatoes.
Occupational therapists can therefore be compared to humanitarians in uniform. Their profession is very responsible since they deal with patients who may be handicaps or mentally ill or unable to walk or suffer from heart attack. Their timetable is extremely flexible and changes day by day. They can work at a patient’s house, in the hospital, at a school, in a mental institution, with the elderly or children.
An occupational therapist is rich in experience. It can be such a fulfilling experience to see your patient able to eat properly after you spent some time with him explaining how to hold a fork and a knife or how to peel a potato. On one occasion, an occupational therapist from the Netherlands helped a patient, who sat on a wheelchair, use her right hand which she couldn’t move an inch. Thirteen weeks later, the patient stood up and walking under supervision, she thanked her occupational therapist, shaking hands with her and waving goodbye with the help of her right hand.
There are so many things one can learn from a patient, depending on the malady every time. After a therapist has spent some time helping these people, he sees the whole world in a totally different way.
There are also occupational therapy departments which help patients combat or prevent disability by training them accordingly in the use of tools for trades, light industrial work, clerical duties and so on. Occupational therapists help also people, who have been hospitalized and unemployed for a very long time, reenter society by teaching them how to confront or even solve the different problems of every day life. Occupational therapists are truly humanitarians in uniform and their work is as important as any doctor’s or nurse’s service. |
