Final Reflection: Occupation-Based Practice

Prior to beginning the program at Touro University Nevada (TUN), I was aware that as
occupational therapists we used meaningful occupations to help treat our clients. In fact, that was
one of the main reasons that I chose to pursue a career in occupational therapy. I was very
attracted to the idea of addressing independence by focusing on function and occupations. While
this is something that I had researched and had observed during my observation hours, I was not
fully aware of how important the use of meaningful occupations actually is to our profession.
Furthermore, I had no idea how difficult it can be to actually incorporate meaningful occupations
into interventions and grade each activity to meet the just right challenge.
From day one, our professors did an exceptional job in educating us on the importance of
implementing meaningful occupations into our treatments. They instilled in us the desire to shift
our profession back to where we started and with what made our profession unique in the first
place: the use of occupations. Throughout the years, the use of occupations began to get lost
within our profession as we shifted toward a more biomechanical model. While I have learned
throughout the program that biomechanical interventions are not necessarily bad if used
appropriately, I also learned the importance of incorporating meaningful occupations with these
interventions. I will leave TUN knowing that as a new occupational therapist it is my
responsibility to carry out occupation-based practice.
The occupational analysis and intervention plan during first semester was one of the
assignments that helped me appreciate the value and difficulty of occupation-based practice. This
was one of our very first assignments, and in it we were introduced to the occupational profile
and occupational analysis. I was able to see how important it is that we get to know our clients
and determine what occupations they find meaningful. By working on these meaningful

occupations, we can motivate our clients to be more engaged in our interventions and reach their
goals faster. Being able to break down the activity into different steps and identifying how each
client factor affected the performance of my client gave me a different perspective. I was able to
analyze factors that I would normally never have thought of and see how they may impact
occupational performance; this helped improve my clinical reasoning. Completing this
assignment helped me fully understand why occupation-based practice is so important to our
profession.
For my first level II fieldwork, I was placed in an early intervention setting and I felt
fortunate to be in a setting in which implementing occupation-based practice was more easily
attainable. I worked with children under the age of three whose main occupation was play; thus, I
focused all of my interventions around play. I really enjoyed coming up with different ideas to
use play in order to work on specific skills that we wanted to target and reach families goals. As I
prepare for my second level II fieldwork in a hospital setting, I am aware that using occupationbased practice will not be as easy; however, I also feel prepared to take on the challenge.