British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy
Activity Analysis Activity analysis is a fundamental skill of occupational therapists . A process used to identify the inherent properties is a given occupation, task , or activity as well as skills, abilities or capacities required to complete it. (
Activity analysis is defined as the process used by OT practitioners which “addresses the typical demands of an activity , the range of skills involved in its performance, and the various cultural meanings that might be ascribed to it”.
Here are examples of the tasks and skills OTs might focus on: Self-care routines like getting dressed (fine motor skills and motor planning) Writing and copying notes (fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination) Holding and controlling a pencil, using scissors (fine motor skills, motor planning)
The demand can be graded by increasing the duration of an activity , by increasing the frequency of doing the activity , by changing the muscles used in the activity or by increasing the intensity.
In order to understand the effect an activity will have on the client, the therapist needs to break it down into these skill areas and look at each one in detail. Activity analysis also includes any potential for adapting the activity in order to allow for change in the client.
Purposeful Activity : Allows patients to engage in goal-directed behaviors or activities within a therapeutically designed context that lead to an occupation.
Four ways to develop the steps needed for a task analysis include watching a master, self-monitoring, brainstorming, and goal analysis .
Grading occupational therapy interventions simply means increasing or decreasing the difficulty of the intervention you’ve provided based on how your patient is responding to it. If the activity is too easy, you would grade it up to make it a greater challenge.
A task is the lowest unit of discrete work which can be identified. An activity may be composed of many tasks . Tasks are highly repetitive, highly formalized, and rigidly defined. A task is the lowest unit of work within the scope of the analysis .
There are 8 areas of occupation that OTs are trained in: Activities of daily living (ADLs) Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) Sleep and rest. Work. Education. Play. Leisure. Social participation.
The challenges facing occupational therapists include proving our value in an economic trend of downsizing, competing within the medical profession, developing and affiliating with new payer sources, and reengineering our careers to meet the needs of the new, nontraditional health care marketplace.
Occupational Therapist According to the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy , occupational therapy is unique in that it uses a holistic approach to look not only at the reasons a client’s participation in activities has been impacted, but also at the client’s roles and environment.
Occupational therapists are taught to find the “ just right challenge ” for children with sensory integration challenges . It is a goal of mine every session to provide your child with challenges that empower them that show them they are able to improve, to succeed and that they are allowed to be themselves!
Adaptation is one’s adaptive response to meet an occupational challenge, when ordinary response is insufficient to master the activity, and is evaluated in relation to the concept “relative mastery” (i.e., evaluating occupational performance from the client’s viewpoint).
Both gradation and adaptation are used in the process of intervention to help a client change perform ance. For the purposes of this unit, grading will refer to changing the complexity of what is to be performed, and adapting will refer to modifying or substituting objects used in per forming the activity .