Discover Occupational Therapy | Cincinnati Children's

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Becky Reder: "Probably the number one question we get is what is the difference for the occupational therapy and physical therapy?"
Karen Harpster: "The OTs and PTs work closely together, all on functional performance."
Jen Angeli: "PT's focus more on gross motor activities. Those are things like rolling, crawling, sitting, standing, walking, mobility."
Amber Sheehan: "Occupational therapists help kids with what we say as skills for the job of living, brushing their teeth, getting clothes on, doing their homework.
Jenny Dorich: "That's playing, that's being a sibling, that's feeding myself, that's going to school."
Becky Reder: "Many times the intervention that we're doing may look like it's nothing more than play, but what's going on in the therapist mind is what muscles are we trying to get to activate? What is the motion and movement that we're trying to create? Because what we do know is that motor learning, repetition over and over again, practicing is what brings about change. Many children, if they have some sort of condition that affects them developmentally, it may affect all areas of development - social, cognitive, their motor development, their speech development, fine motor development."
Karen Harpster: "We pride ourselves on what we call 'evidence-based' care. Meaning that we looked at the evidence to see what intervention is the best one for that child in that condition. We typically treat a lot of kids through what we call episodes of care. When I first met Parker, we work in more on developmental skills, so developmental play skills. Then I believe that next episode he did was constraint induced movement therapy followed up by manual therapy."
Jen Angeli: "When we talk about episodic care, we take what matters most to the patient or family at that particular junction in life. And we work really hard to achieve those goals for a short period of time."
Karen Harpster: "For him that was zipping at code, getting into his locker shoe tying, carrying bins from the basement to his room. I'm saying his toys, things that really were influencing his life every day that he wanted to get better at."
Becky Reder: "We could actually achieve more with that method than just ongoing continuous therapy. What's different though with goal directed task specific training is that the family and child identify a task that's important to them. And then the focus is on determining a method in a way that they can learn that task."
Karen Harpster: "Our goal is for the kids to not need us. We want to work on things to make them more independent. The wellness programs are really a joint effort between OT and PT."
Becky Reder: "Our Be Well program is a bike program where we bring in bikers who up till now, due to their physical challenges, had been unable to learn how to ride a bike. This past summer. I think we had well over 85 percent of the children learn how to independently ride their own bicycle."
Jen Angeli: "When we fixed the thing that helps them to do what's really meaningful and it feels like a priority to them and to get to watch them accomplish that and then experience the joy from that, that's remarkable."