Overview
According to the AOTA, the focus of occupational therapy for stroke survivors is to help them achieve health, well-being, and participation in life through engagement of occupations. Occupational therapy practitioners collaborate with clients, families, and caregivers to determine what activities are meaningful to them. OTPs analyze the client’s person, environment, and the occupations they want to perform. As CVA can cause changes in all aspects of a person’s life – their physical, cognitive, and emotional factors, they have a role in addressing every occupation – self-care skills, IADLs, community reintegration, work-related tasks, school, child care, and so on. OTPs help to develop strategies to address psychosocial health. Overall, occupational therapy focuses on ensuring that the client will function as well as possible in all aspects of recovery to improve their quality of life and increase their independence safely.1
OT Dude: Stroke is life-changing not only for the client but those around them – their neighbors, family, friends, their community. It literally ‘takes a village’, a multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals and ancillary staff to rehabilitate stroke survivors and to uplift them to lead fulfilling lives after this disease. The most common psychosocial problems that I observe in my day-to-day with stroke survivors in ARU is an adjustment to disability and depression. OTPs work with stroke survivors at their most vulnerable and must take a top-down approach combined with empathy, patience, and optimization to support and cheer them on. One distinction you should make is that while working with stroke survivors in practice (such as your experience in fieldwork with the CVA population) may be much different than ‘textbook’, it is important to think more ‘textbook’ for the sake of the NBCOT Exam.
- AOTA. (n.d.). The Role of Occupational Therapy in Stroke Rehabilitation. Retrieved from https://www.aota.org/about-occupational-therapy/professionals/rdp/stroke.aspx[↩]