OT Guidelines and Structure Continuum
Occupational Therapy
Video Explaining Guidelines and Structure Continuum
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There is a process to follow as an Occupational Therapy Practitioner that will allow you to develop and refine your plan of care and treatment continuums when working with clients. You can use this continuum in any place setting. It is an already established checklist to follow that will allow you to remain grounded in your scope of practice, competent in your rationale, and acheive fantastic therapeutic outcomes with your patients!
In school, they constantly tell you that it is difficult to teach specifics of a therapeutic process based on a diagnosis. That is not true. It is not difficult to teach on the therapeutic continuum of a specific diagnosis because we all have access to the same evidence-based research. Instead, they state that curriculum is designed to assist you in clinical reasoning and allow you to have the clinical insight to create treatments, interventions, and choose assessments that are specific to your client. There is truth to that!
Especially in occupational therapist programs, we are taught a ton of assessments, theories, models of practice, and themes of references. Unfortunately, we aren’t taught how to use these materials when it comes to building a treatment plan and achieving results while staying client centered. This graphic allows you the Birdseye view of what the occupational therapy process looks like if you want to remain grounded in your scope of practice and competent and rational. By following this continuum you can be confident as a practitioner that you are doing what you went to school to do. Other professions and administrators want to control your scope of practice, but it’s because they don’t know it. You need to be the master of your scope of practice. You need to know it better than anyone, even your peers and occupational therapy. I doing this, you are naturally gaining the confidence that you need to advocate for the intervention models you are choosing to use with your client and document defensively.
OT was never meant to be ‘herded’ by other professions. We were designed to have the most liberty to pull from any model of practice within the medical and social models of medicine so that we can holistiically meet the needs of our clients. This continuum allows you to address Person (intrinsic factors), Environment (extrinsic factors), and Occupational deficits.