Occupational Therapy News OTnews October 2018 | Page 37

CHILDREN’S SERVICES FEATURE
© GettyImages/KatarzynaBialasiewicz
performance and participation of their children.
Traditionally, parents have attended therapy sessions and have
been relayed with strategies and tools to develop their children’s
skills when their children present as challenged by tasks.
However, recent emerging evidence suggests that parents
should also have their own objectives in relation to developing
their knowledge and understanding of their occupational role as a
parent.
Occupational performance coaching provides the opportunity
to develop a child’s performance within occupations, while
also equipping their parent with transferable skills in analysis
and evaluation of their child’s performance across a number of
occupations, in context to the child and their environments.
The process of occupational performance coaching relies on
the therapist guiding the parent through an exploration of the
person (their child and the presenting struggles), the occupation
(occupational analysis) and the environment (within context).
This leads on to parents problem solving and identifying children with ASD referred and accepted to the service.
The screening session facilitated time to listen to the family’s
narrative and supported therapists to appropriately identify the
stream of the pathway to follow .
The streams included a pure occupational performance
coaching approach (that is, working only with the parent), a multi-
therapy assessment and treatment block (that is, direct one-to-one
therapy) or a hybrid combination of the two.
A separate stream within the pathway was identified for those
children requiring assessment and contribution for Education Health
Care Plans (EHCP).
If appropriate within the screening session the therapist could
also start to explore the Canadian Occupational Performance
Measure (COPM) to identify goals and pre-intervention scores for
either the occupational performance coaching or the treatment
sessions when the stream had been identified.  
changes that can be made to facilitate achieving goals and
improving performance and satisfaction scores. Once implemented as the ‘new’ ASD pathway as part of the service,
therapists within the wider team looked at ways to implement this
Because of the occupation centeredness and evidence base
behind occupational performance coaching the working party felt it
was an appropriate tool to use when looking at reshaping the ASD
pathway of the service.
Therapists started using the occupational performance coaching
screening tool as a parent-only initial assessment session for
Continuing service development through the use of OPC
evidence-based intervention within other aspects or clinical areas
of the service.
Education: the occupational therapy team has commissioned
time by three ASD special schools across the two boroughs. The
scope and priorities of occupational therapy within the schools has
been, up to now, an agreed agenda between the schools’ senior
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