Occupational therapy

[Lookingfornewdirection]

Any OTs here that could be willing to share their views on the professions? I’m a 40yo SAHM looking to return to work this year but just feel so turned off by my old career, which is business/technology related consulting. Have a degree in business, but have for a long time felt I lack genuine interest and passion for it, and also don’t use my full potential and don’t really excel in my career. Money is good but it also can be stressful.

I have previously dreamt of becoming a psychologist but where I am this is very competitive to get into and at my age I find it would be too difficult, might spend years just trying to get admitted to the education. Now there is an option to study OT. This would be a three year degree and much easier to get in to.

I struggle to get a clear understanding of what OT work is like. I know it’s very versatile and you can work with a lot of different things, from physical injuries to MH issues. Could any OT shed some light on what they actually do, especially if working more on the MH side or with children with additional needs? I’m interested in ASD for example and could see myself working with ASD children. But what it is really like?

Another area that might interest me would be well-being at work. I imagine this might be something an OT could also work with?

Is the work generally challenging and interesting in your opinion? Any information is valuable to me at this point 😊

Thank you so much for any insights!

I am/was an OT and I loved it. I have been a SAHM for almost 10 years but am starting to look into getting back into OT. I used to feel like “I can’t believe I am being paid to do this” level of contentment with my job.

OT can be incredibly varied as you mentioned. I’m was in adult physical health - I worked in a hospital helping mostly older adults to get home safely from an inpatient stay. It was fast paced, goal oriented, team focussed- I really felt like I was making a difference to people’s hospital experience. It was very rewarding. I am also nosey and easily bored by nature so loved finding out all about different people’s lives/living set ups.

I didn’t go down the paediatric route as that’s not really my area of interest, but I know a good OT can make an incredible difference to a family who is struggling with a neurodiverse child.

The wonderful thing about OT is that you really can choose an area that suits your personality. As I mentioned I really thrive in short term goal focused high speed environments, but there are OTs in the community who work on one goal for years and love the slow steady pace of that, or are mostly adaptation focused rather than therapy focused.

You mention well-being at work, and that is not an area that I’ve come across within OT really, except as a wholistic approach to a particular client (eg helping a child with ASD settle in their job). Maybe you are thinking of Occupational Health, which is not connected to Occupational Therapy as far as I know.

I did OT as my second degree and therefore had the option of doing an accelerated course which took 2 years instead of 3 years. Might be worth looking into.

Good Luck with it all!

Thanks a lot for your reply @Movingonup84 , it was helpful!

When I mentioned work related well-being, I had things like stress management, work content or work environment adjustments etc on mind. But perhaps those indeed fall rather under occupational health.

I guess I would rather like to work in a role where I could support clients holistically rather than related to a specific injury. So, help them with overall coping and quality of life improvement. Apart from working with kids, I could also see myself working with adult clients who have more or less normal mental capacity but who are struggling with some challenges. Maybe clients who are burned out in their work and daily life, mums who have PND or are exhausted by their kids for one reason or another, clients who suffer from things like anxiety, social phobia etc. This type of thing would also interest me, but not sure what an OT can do for those clients vs other professionals like counselors. Don’t know what it is about OT that makes it seem kind of vague and difficult to understand - I don’t have any issues imagining what a physiotherapist does day to day and how they help clients ! 😊

Hmmmm… I hope another OT will be along soon to give you another perspective.

I’ve always said everyone would benefit from OT, and maybe some OT’s do get involved with some of the client groups you listed above, (burned out, PND) but honestly I’ve not heard of any in real life. I would love to see it but never have. Maybe in the private sector? You would be able to work with people with anxiety/ depression etc in mental health OT, but when I did my training the patients that I saw were people with fairly severe diagnoses such as inpatients with schizophrenia or anorexia. Perhaps there are community services out there that I’m not aware of though. I have been out of the system for many years.

The elevator pitch of OT that I was taught was that we help someone return to meaningful occupation following an illness or injury. Occupation can be self care (washing, dressing, making meals etc), leisure (hobbies, accessing social life) and productivity (paid or unpaid employment). So in physical health we often work closely with physios to analyse what activities a person wants return to doing, and break them down into graded manageable chunks. So an OT might identify that a person who has had a stroke is feeling really unhappy and helpless, and that part of that is that they are being spoonfed by their partner because they spill their food all the time. In order to feed themselves the person requires improved grip to hold cutlery. The OT and physio might work together on the particular muscles necessary to improve the grip. The OT might establish that the person needs an adapted fork with larger grips while they are regaining their strength, or they might need another adaptive equipment long term to enable independent feeding in another way if improved grip strength is out of reach. My feeling is OT is a bit more “broad” than physio taking into account social and environmental factors too, whereas physios are a bit more bio mechanically focussed (the physios are going to come for me now! Eek).

In mental health/ learning disabilities a person might be working on maintaining the concentration, motivation or sequencing necessary to work through the many steps of taking a shower, or catching the bus to see a friend. It’s all analysed in the context of that particular person’s situation, broken down into chunks and made easier or harder (graded) to enable gradual progress.

However, as I said above I have been out of practise for years so perhaps the profession has moved on. This has been my experience of it.

Mother & baby units plus their community services have OTs

Another OT here- over 25 years experience after a professional degree entry course. I am very lucky to love my job. I am an advanced practitioner working with children with NeuroDevelopmental challengers including working as part of a diagnostic team, and with early intervention with small children. I also work with looked-after children who have experienced trauma and abuse.

An emerging area of practice is health and well-being; pretty much exactly what you've described about working to improve quality of life.
RCOT and the CAOT are promoting the role of OTs working with GPs and with business to address issues before they end up at tertiary (hospital) care.

Early in my career OTs in the emergency dept were unusua. It is now a given, that it is cost effective for the OT to travel out to (some) ambulance calls, particularly for older person care. This can prevent admissions.
The logical extension of this is OTs working preventatively.

The other development is that OTs are one of the professions that can sign people off from work due to illness or injury. Needs advanced training for the OT.
Again, similar to developments in Australia, where there is better workforce care, it is all about getting in early as a preventative rather than rehabilitative.

I am absolutely evangelical about the value of OTs.
Everything that we do is a "complex intervention" meaning that there are multiples of variables to be considered.
So if you like complex problem solving, it is a wonderful career.

I am an OT working in the community mainly providing equipment and adaptations. Some of my work is hugely complex and I deal with a vast range of people and health conditions. I love my job.

As others have said OT covers many different areas of work and there is something for every personality I think. There are so many role emerging jobs that is is endless. When you are an OT you end up frustrated that lots of new government ideas are just OT - for example
social prescribing.

We need to do a much better job of promoting our unique role. Basically doing the things you need and want to do is good for your health - who knew ha ha.