OTnews August 2020 | Page 16

FEATURE SERVICE DEVELOPMENT
Going the social distance
Melissa Bautista, Tom Burchfield, Vicky D’Abo,
Marie O’Connor and Karson Wong reflect on a community children’s
occupational therapy team’s journey to provide a virtual service
© GettyImages/fizkes
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced
many services and clinicians across the
country to adapt and change the way they
work. The Evelina Community Children’s
Occupational Therapy Team aimed beyond simply
surviving the challenges brought on by the pandemic;
our goal was to thrive through the creation of
innovative service delivery approaches that would have
value beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our team saw this as an opportunity to review
and further develop our existing occupational therapy
services.
Our objective was to continue to deliver an
occupation-based approach virtually to families of
children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This
had been previously delivered in face-to-face groups
with parents and carers.
Going back to basics
Our solution was firmly grounded in occupational
therapy models of practice, including the Person,
Environment and Occupation Model (PEO) (Law et
al 1996) and the Canadian Model of Occupational
Performance and Engagement (CMOP-E) (Townsend
and Polatajko 2007).
Our intervention draws on the principles of
Occupational Performance Coaching (OPC) (Graham,
Roger and Ziviani 2009). Occupational-based
16 OTnews August 2020