The key to thinking like an Occupational Therapist is to think about overall functional performance. Two fundamental questions that Occupational Therapists must think about are:
- Can my client do what they want or need to do every day?
- If not, what is stopping them?
These two questions are the universal starting points to OT practice, regardless of the setting. While they seem to be common sense, it is how Occupational Therapists approach these questions that make them unique.
When a client is unable to engage in daily activities, Occupational Therapists use holistic models of thinking to analyze different aspects of the situation and their respective impacts on engagement. There are several models commonly used by Occupational Therapists including the Model of Human Occupation (MOHO), the Person-Environment-Occupation (PEO) model, the Ecology of Human Performance (EHP) model, and the KAWA model. However, the model most commonly used in Canadian OT practice is the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement (CMOP-E).
The CMOP-E, as shown below, views engagement in meaningful everyday activities as influenced by many different variables including internal factors (e.g. physical, cognitive, emotional health), external factors (e.g. physical, social, institutional, and cultural environments), and occupational factors (e.g. types of activities, how activities are performed, activity demands). Helping clients return to meaningful everyday activities means Occupational Therapists assess all of these factors and analyze how each impacts a client’s functional performance. This holistic method of thinking enables Occupational Therapists to clearly identify clients’ functional performance issues and devise effective interventions to help re-engage clients in desired activities.