Hannah Tull

I contacted Jana Woodruff an Occupational Therapy site manager at Elks Rehab Hospital in Boise, Idaho. Jana is a Clinical Laboratory Technologist (CLT) and an Occupational Therapist, Registered, Licensed (OTR/L).  She informed me on the five treatment trends occurring right now for Occupational Therapists in Boise. She mentioned vision rehabilitation, modified constraint therapy, driving evaluations, alternative pain management in therapy and team approach for Parkinson’s disease.

Vision rehabilitation is a popular topic in occupational therapy currently and how to go about treating the patients. Woodruff mentioned that it is important for all of the doctors working on rehabilitating the patient’s vision to work together. Many factors come into account when treating a patient and all should work as a team to best fit the needs of the patient. The different parts of a patient’s “team” can include regular eye doctor, functional optometrists, neuro opthomalogist, and education primary physicians. What is happening with OT in this topic is they are trying to figure out what their role is and how they can best be part of this team.

Modified constraint therapy is a new method at the Elks Rehab Hospital and has proved to be very successful! The way the mCIAT works is if patients have had a neurological insult and they have trouble performing daily tasks with one of their arms they place the working arm in a mit and have the patients perform tasks with there non functioning arm while constraining the functioning arm. Patients are also given the mit to take home and a binder of tasks that they need to practice. This has been highly successful in helping patients return to function of their arms but it is also highly dependent on if the patients do there at work at home with the binder.  

Jana said driving evaluations is not just a Boise trend but is a current need in all communities. She said that many families and physicians are afraid of taking away patients driving privileges because they do not want to offend the patient. What an OT does is assesses the patients ability to perform certain functions while driving and then determines if they can continue to perform that task safely. Occupational Therapists start with a pre-driving assessment where they assess the patient’s visual, cognitive and motor response skills. Then they take the patient driving on a special route to determine how they do and may even suggest modifications to the vehicle to make it easier for the patient. After those two assessments a patient may move on to driver’s training where they will be taught how to drive safer and more successfully.

Occupational Therapists are always looking for new innovative ways to help their patients.  One thing they are looking for right now is alternative pain management in therapy. Jana said traditional pain management includes hot/cold packs, pain medication, and estim/TENS. Occupational Therapists are looking at integrative restoration and mirror box therapy to see if these treatments can be as effective or even more so than traditional treatments.  

The last trend Jana mentioned was a team approach to Parkinson’s disease.  Jana said that they recently sent a team of therapists including Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists and speech therapists, to a conference in Denver on Parkinson's disease. She said that traditionally Physical Therapists treated Parkinson’s patients but a more team treatment approach is being considered. In a team approach to treating Parkinson’s disease the role of the OT would be to have a functional balance for the patient during activities of daily living.