What to Expect on a OT Home Visit

What To Expect on Your OT Home Visit

So you have an occupational therapy home visit booked, and you’re not sure what’s going to happen when someone visits you in your home. So for a Community Occupational Therapist, for people who see adults at home, what we’re hoping to do, is to see how a person interacts with their environment and then see their level of function in everyday activities.

This could be things like washing up, walking through the house, even getting on and off the toilet. All these things make up our everyday life. So, if we were to consider what would happen on your home visit, the hope is it might take about an hour and a half for the first time that we meet you.

What we’re looking for is the background information that led to the condition that you might have. So we’re just trying to understand the medical side and how that interacts with your level of function. From there, we then go into your home and go room by room and see your functioning within those rooms. Is there something that’s hard to do in the bedroom? Is it hard to get on and off the bed? Is there something that’s hard to do in the bathroom? Is it hard to get in and out of the shower? 

All these things help us to come up with a picture of strategies and options on how to help you to manage at home, to be as safe and independent as possible. Because at the end of the day, what we’re hoping for is to improve your quality of life. To help you to manage well, and the people that are around you, your carers, your support network. We want them to be able to manage to support you in a sustainable way.

So, what we’re hoping is by coming along, we’ll give you ideas, we’ll give you options, we’ll give you short-term strategies, long-term strategies, and then you can choose what’s going to work for you. Then we link back to the insurer’s guidelines. So, for example, if you’re in NDIS, then we will be looking for reasonable and necessary guidelines. If you’re under iCare, it would be the treatment, rehab, and care requirements. So whichever funding body you’re under, we will understand the scheme that you’re in, and then we’ll do our best to be able to align your goals in what we can get supported through the insurer versus things that you might want to do for yourself.

We’re just going to give you ideas, options, strategies to help. We’ll give you education along the way.  So, some of the ideas of things that we could help you with might be around by the toilet or something to help you get off the toilet, that raises it higher. Maybe it might be an electric bed to help you get in and out of bed or pressure care equipment if you have a pressure injury. Or any wheelchair, or a wheelchair that takes you to appointments, there are so many different things that Occupational Therapists can help you with, that are actually very client-centered. I can’t tell you what other people get, because the most important thing is to look at you, your goals, your needs, and where to help you from there.

So on a home visit, we’ll also go through the Consent Form. So we want to make sure that you’re kept in the loop for people with who we communicate, as well as looking at Service Agreements. And just those documents that just say that you’re happy to work with us as your team. So we here at Capable Spaces, our goal is to help you to be as capable and independent as possible in all the spaces of your world. That could be technology, could be equipment, could be home modifications, could be education, could be strategies to help. So when we come on a home visit, just let us know the things that are your goals and we’ll work to help support you as best as possible. 

Get in touch today if you’d like an occupational therapy home visit, someone to come to your home and to see how we can help support you to live as safely and independently as possible in the community.