The Social Ecological Model Of Occupational Therapy

Occupational therapy strives to help individuals across the lifespan with and without disability live their life to the fullest by enabling them to do things they want or need to do. Occupational therapy is a holistic profession that aims to promote health and prevent, maintain, or improve live with a disability, illness or injury. Occupational therapy falls under public health because it looks at public health issues that impact patients and advocate for changes that can benefit copious individuals. The profession is also actively participating in health promotion by enabling people to increase control over their own health and work to improve health. Through engagement in occupations, everyday activities that are meaningful and purposeful

The social ecological model describes factors that influence a health behavior. It evaluates factors at the individual, interpersonal, community, and societal level that increase or decrease an individual's likeliness to carry out a certain behavior. Looking at the social ecological model helps with the formulation of intervention approaches to change behavior such as educational programs to change attitudes, changing social norms, and changing policy. Likewise, the Person-Environment-Occupation Performance (PEOP) Model is used in occupational therapy and it looks at intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influence a person's engagement and performance in occupations. The PEOP Model believes that occupational performance is the result of the transaction among the person, occupations, and the environment. It evaluates intrinsic factors such as an individual’s cognition and spirituality and the physiological, neuro-behavioral, and psychological functions of a person. Extrinsic factors such as social support, social and economic systems, culture and values, built environment, technology, and natural environment are examined too. The PEOP Model emphasizes the interaction between the person and environment and its effects on occupation and occupational therapists work to implement interventions that address these factors that affect occupations in order to maximize engagement and performance. Hence, promotion of well-being and

In addition, students or professionals can seek ways to implement interventions at a greater scale in order to promote health and wellbeing. Students and professionals can work with community centers, schools, and other places on educational programs on various issues. For example, they can implement an educational program on fall prevention at adult day care centers or education on energy conservation. Educational programs on preventing fatigue can also be implemented at a larger scale. Occupational therapy practitioners can also help link individuals with services they need and also identify an individual’s deficit that can result in harm to not only themselves but also others. For example, through therapy, occupational therapists can identify people who have deficits that intervene with driving and make recommendations to address these deficits to prevent them from causing unintentional accidents on the road. It is always important to address deficits in individuals that can result in harm to the community and society and come up with interventions that can be implemented at various levels to benefit the