Research Paper On Occupational Therapy

Is Occupational Therapy the Right Career for Me?

Occupational therapy is a career focused on helping people who have or are at risk for developing an illness, injury, disease, disorder, condition, impairment, disability, activity limitation, or participation restriction. An OT’s scope of practice may involve addressing “the physical, cognitive, psychosocial, sensory, and other aspects of performance to support engagement in everyday life activities that affect health, well-being, and quality of life” (Definition of Occupational Therapy Practice for the AOTA Model Practice Act, 2017). I don’t feel like occupational therapy is the right career for me because I feel like I lack certain characteristics that someone in this profession should have.

These were to enjoy helping people, strong communication skills, strong interpersonal skills, good problem solving, creativity, flexibility, and to enjoy working with others. I feel like I’m good at problem solving, and I enjoy helping others, but I lack strong communication and interpersonal skills. I feel like these are two skills that a person working in the healthcare setting should excel at, and I’m still working on them. I’m also a little shy, so I feel like I lack the “outgoing” personality that most healthcare professionals seem to have.

Although I would enjoy helping patients with physical disabilities, I feel like I would face multiple challenges working as an occupational therapist. One field of occupational therapy that I can see myself doing well in is acute care. Acute care requires knowledge of disease processes, medical interventions, and how to properly evaluate a patient. As a nursing student, I feel like these are areas that I have experience with and would excel

I feel like this would also be challenging for me, depending on what the issue is. According to the AOTA website, some skills that an OT would assist this type of client with would be “cognition, independent living, social skills, ADL’s, stress management, assertiveness, and self-sufficiency” (OT and Community Mental Health, 2017). I consider myself a passive person, and I don’t think I would do a great job at teaching another person how to be assertive. Trying to teach a patient how to manage their stress would also be a challenge for me because I don’t even know how to manage my own stress, but I feel like this is a skill that I could work to improve on before having to teach it to