Occupational Therapy – Pearson Allied Health Services

Offering both Adult and Children’s services

As allied health professionals, we strive to assist individuals to live an independent and meaningful life. Our Occupational Therapists work closely with clients and those around them to develop skills and strategies that allow them to complete everyday activities and tasks that are essential to living independently and engaging in their community.

Therapy sessions can be one on one with the individual, or can include family members or support staff to utilise a holistic and whole team approach to therapy. Our team can also offer care giver training programs on a range of topics.

Sessions can take place in clinic, or in a convenient location.

How Our Team Can Assist
Assessments

How Our Team Can Assist

Some of the areas our team can assist with

Gross Motor Skills: Movements and actions that use larger muscle groups and body parts, this includes: running, jumping, skipping, maintaining good posture and balance.
Fine Motor Skills: Movements and actions that use smaller muscles and body parts and often require precision. This includes: holding a pen/pencil, using scissors or cutlery, and using buttons and zippers.

Sensory Processing: How we receive and process information from our environment and react to this information. This information includes: sights, sounds, smell, taste and touch.
Social Skills: The skills we use to communicate and interact with others, including use of appropriate language and non-verbal cues, and understanding the ‘rules’ like turn taking and active listening. These skills also include play skills, conflict resolution and risk awareness.

Daily Living and Functional Life Skills: The skills we utilise to physically care for ourselves, this includes activities like cooking and feeding ourselves, toileting and maintaining our personal hygiene. These are also the skills we utilise to live independently and access our community, like cleaning our homes, shopping for food, money handling and transport.
Sleep: Identifying barriers and challenges to maintaining healthy sleep and developing different strategies and routines and trialling these to increase our sleep health.
After a fall, injury, accident or loss of limbs.
Sensory Processing: The way in which our nervous systems receives sensory information and generates a response to this information. For some people, it can be difficult to process incoming sensory information and results in challenges generating appropriate responses to the information.

Assessments

Assessments and Program Development:

The first steps our Occupational Therapists will take when starting therapy with a new individual is to gather informal information about your needs and complete an individual assessment. This will provide us with the necessary information to start developing an individual therapy plan that best meets the needs of the individual and works towards their goals. Assessments help us to:

Identify any strengths and areas the individual finds challenging
What factors might be contributing to these challenges and how to minimise these
Develop an individualised therapy plan to address these challenges and build skills
Introduce and implement strategies with the individual and their support network

If you have a National Disability Insurance Scheme Plan, as part of the reporting requirements at each plan review, individual assessments need to be conducted before starting a new therapy and either when you finish the therapy or at the end of each plan. These assessments provide us with ‘pre and post-baseline data’, or in simple terms, it provides a snapshot before and after therapy. This helps us when reporting on what progress was made and to develop recommendations for your future plan.