Occupational Therapy
The Occupational Therapy department aims to enable and empower brain injury survivors to achieve optimal functional ability in their everyday lives.
Following a Brain Injury, a person can experience a variety of physical, cognitive, emotional, behavioural and social difficulties. On admission, clients participate in an assessment period where standardised, non-standardised and functional tasks are used to ascertain a client’s strengths and deficits. A client-centred treatment plan is then devised using every day activities as the treatment medium. Activities are graded and adapted to challenge and motivate clients so that they can re-establish old skills or learn new ones.
Functional tasks used include:
- Personal care
- Domestic Activities of daily living
- Mobility – public transport, walking or powered wheelchair work
- Budget and planning
- Shopping
- Meal preparation
Additional areas of focus:
- Seating and wheelchair needs
- Upper limb assessment, treatment and splinting needs
- Exploring the use of environmental controls
- Exploring the use of adapted equipment
- General household management (including storage of food items, healthy living group, etc.)
- Liaison with external agencies with regards to future planning and transition
- Throughout their rehabilitation, clients are encouraged to increase their ability to take responsibility for themselves and their living environment in either their allocated bedrooms or, one of the graded Supported Living Units, which include:
- Bedsits
- Cottage
- Group Home
- Supported Independent Living flats
- A consistent inter-disciplinary approach is implemented to enable clients to develop strategies and techniques to assist with cognition and physical difficulties (including motivation and insight). Clients are facilitated to develop use of compensatory strategies and adapted aids as required. It is anticipated that the client’s journey towards increased participation and independence, within everyday activities, will be achieved through generalising skills learned during their period of rehabilitation.
