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Hi, my name is Richard Khoo. I’m an occupational therapist working at Toronto Rehab. We’re a network of five hospitals in downtown Toronto.
An occupation therapist is a health professional who specializes in assessing the way that people perform their activities that do in everyday life.
Sometimes people hear the word occupation and think, “Oh, you help people find jobs.�€? That could be part of it, but it’s a lot more than that.
We look at activities that people do throughout the day, everything from just being able to look after yourself.
So, being able to do all of your self-care activities like showering, bathing, toileting, getting dressed.
Being able to cook for yourself, being able to look after how well can you clean the place that you live. To your leisure activities – what you do in your spare time.
I had never heard about Occupational Therapy until I got to University. When I started University I was actually a Mechanical Engineer.
But, I had a friend who was an OT and her work was always a lot more interesting than mine.
I wasn’t so interested in the nitty gritty design and manufacture of the products, I was more interested in “How does this impact people?�€?
and “How do we teach people how to use these things?�€? I just found that in OT, a lot of the philosophies and what drives the profession, the ideas behind it,
were really congruent with my own thinking.
An area that OTs work with people in is their ability to look after themselves and get ready.
This gentleman here can actually shave on his own. The thing he’s working on is paying attention and being able to finish the whole thing without getting distracted.
So that’s something that we’re working on.
So I don’t have to be in there helping him shave. It’s more about giving him the excuse to keep him on track with what he’s doing.
Good work, John. Beautiful as always.
When I went through OT, it was a Bachelor of Science programme,
but there is a real push in the profession that all the programmes in Canada are soon to be Master’s programmes.
This is Heather. She was in a pretty bad car accident.
In the accident she ended up fracturing every long bone in her body. Her arms, her legs and she also had a brain injury during that accident.
Other things we might do as OTs are the management of scars, trying to help reduce the visibility of them,
but also often scars tend to become very sensitive
and so we help with the desensitization process where people learn to feel things normally again around their injuries.
Because of her injuries, especially the ones to her skull, there’s a little bit of damage to the one side by her eyes
so we don’t really have a clear picture of how she’s seeing things in her environment.
An OT is also trained in assessing vision and the way people perceive things.
It’s hard to not see change in a person and see someone who is perhaps very independent and in control of their lives now required to have some around them all the time.
It’s sometimes hard not to identify with that and not to let your own mood and your own view of your ability to make an impact
not to let those change and still stay positive and focused on what you are doing.
We make pretty good salaries, we’re pretty comfortable, but certainly nothing in the range of what a doctor might make.
One of the greatest things is being able to love what you do
and I think the only way you can do that is to find something that really suits your own personalities and your own views.
I just happened to have found a place that I can practice what I really enjoy and all the other people that I work with as well; so I think I’ve got the best of both worlds.
I’ve found a good profession and a good place to work. It makes a big difference when you don’t mind getting up and going to work.