Occupational therapists and their assistants assist a wide variety of people participate in the things that they both want and need to do. They achieve this through the therapeutic use of everyday activities, some of which include helping children with disabilities to participate fully in school and social situations, helping people recovering from injury to regain skills, and providing supports for older adults experiencing physical and cognitive changes. Occupational therapy services typically include an individualized evaluation, which is used to determine the clients’ goals, customized intervention to improve the person’s ability to perform daily activities and reach the goals, and an evaluation of the outcome to ensure that any established goals are being met, and whether or not changes need to be made to the intervention plan.

Occupational therapy services may include comprehensive evaluations of the client’s home and other environments (e.g., workplace, school), recommendations for adaptive equipment and training in its use, and guidance and education for family members and caregivers. Occupational therapy practitioners have a holistic perspective, in which the focus is on adapting the environment to fit the person, and the person is an integral part of the therapy team.

Developing and maintaining a definition of its nature and scope assert that while this presents a challenge proves to be a key challenge in occupational therapy. It also results in a unique flexibility which allows the discipline to move with the flow of social, cultural and environmental change. This difficulty in definition may be a cause of chronic strain for practitioners and may also contribute to a lack of role definition and subsequent blurring.

The role of Occupational Therapy allows OT’s to work in many different settings, work with many different populations and acquire many different specialties. This broad spectrum of practice lends itself to difficulty categorizing the areas of practice that exist, especially considering the many countries and different healthcare systems. In this section, the categorization from the American Occupational Therapy Association is used. However, there are other ways to categorize areas of practice in OT, such as physical, mental, and community practice. These divisions occur when the setting is defined by the population it serves, for example, acute physical or mental health settings (e.g., hospitals), sub-acute settings (e.g., aged care facilities), outpatient clinics, and community settings.

In each area of practice below, an OT can work with different populations, diagnosis, specialties, and in different settings:

Occupational therapy during WWI (bedridden wounded are knitting), pediatrics (schools, community, inpatient hospital based child OT), acute care hospitals (inpatient hospital setting for individuals with a serious medical condition(s) usually due to a traumatic event where the primary goal of is to stabilize the patient’s medical status and address any threats to his or her life and loss of function), inpatient rehabilitation (e.g., Spinal Cord Injuries), rehabilitation centers (e.g., Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), stroke (CVA), spinal cord injuries, and head injuries), skilled nursing facilities, home health, and outpatient clinics (e.g., hand therapy, orthopedics).

Other areas of practice include specialist assessment centers (e.g., Electronic assistive technology, Posture and Mobility services, and functional capacity evaluation), hospices, assisted living facilities, productive aging (skills and services to older adults to maximize independence, participation, and quality of life), work hardening  (enables people with physical, psychological, and psychosocial issues inhibiting a person’s ability to successfully return to work), and work conditioning (purely involves improving physical capacities).

Community based practice sees the benefits of working with individuals in the comfort of their own environment rather than in a hospital setting. The knowledge and skills related to physical and mental health are often combined to create a powerful therapeutic result. It may also involve working with atypical populations (homeless or at-risk). Examples of community-based practice settings include health promotion and lifestyle change, private practice, aging in place, low vision (use clients’ remaining vision to complete daily routines), intermediate care services, driving centers, day centers, schools, child development centers, peoples’ own homes, work and Industry, homeless shelters, educational settings, and refugee camps.

According to the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), occupational therapists work with the Mental Health population throughout the life span and across many treatment settings where mental health services and psychiatric rehabilitation are provided.  Similar to other clients, the OT smoothes the progress of maximum independence in daily living activities and influential activities of daily living. The OT improves functional capacity and quality of life for people with mental illness in the areas of employment, education, community living, and home and personal care through the use of real life activities in therapy treatments.

In general, geriatric, adult, adolescents, and children with any kind of mental illness or mental health issues are treated for conditions such as schizophrenia, substance abuse, addiction, dementia, Alzheimer’s, mood disorders, personality disorders, psychoses, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and reactive attachment disorder (children only). Typical issues that are addressed by an OT are as commonly helping people acquire the skills to care for themselves or others including; keeping a schedule, medication management, employment, education, increasing community participation, community access (grocery store, library, bank, etc.), money management skills, engaging in productive activities to fill the day, coping skills, routine building, building social skills, and childcare.