How can a Private OT help you?

If daily life has become harder, for you or for someone in your family, it is not always clear who to ask. Occupational therapy is a route people often find late, after they have already tried a few others. This is a plain explanation of how a private Occupational Therapist can help, and the kind of work our OTs do.

What an Occupational Therapist does

An Occupational Therapist looks at what you need or want to do each day, works out what is getting in the way, and finds a way round it. That might mean doing a task differently, adding a piece of equipment, changing the room the task happens in, or building strength and confidence back up over time.

The word occupational causes some confusion. It does not only mean paid work. It covers whatever occupies your day: washing and dressing, cooking a meal, getting up the stairs, looking after your children, seeing friends, going back to a job you had before.

How a private Occupational Therapist can help at home

Home is where most of our work starts. An OT will visit, watch how you manage the parts of the day you find hardest, and talk through what you want to be able to do. What comes out of it is a report setting out clear recommendations.

That might cover getting in and out of the bath safely, managing the stairs, preparing a meal without standing for long, or getting in and out of bed without help. Where someone has been having falls, the assessment looks at what in the home is contributing to them.

Our Housing OTs also carry out assessments of a whole property, assessments of a property someone is thinking of buying, and reports to support a Disabled Facilities Grant application. You can read more about our housing and equipment assessments.

Equipment and adaptations

Equipment ranges from a simple item costing a few pounds to something made for one person. The point of the assessment is to match the person to the right thing, so that it actually gets used rather than sitting in a corner.

That covers specialist seating and wheelchairs, profiling beds, riser recliner chairs, stairlifts and hoists, along with larger adaptations like level access showers and ramps. What suits one person will not suit another, which is why the recommendation follows the assessment rather than the other way round.

For adaptation work, our therapists can produce scaled drawings of the current and proposed layout so a builder has something to work from, and will attend visits with surveyors and equipment suppliers to check the work matches what was recommended.

After an illness, injury or operation

There is often a gap between being well enough to be discharged and actually managing at home. Functional rehabilitation is about closing that gap: relearning the tasks that matter, in the place they need to happen, at a pace that works.

Some of our OTs specialise in neurological conditions, including stroke, brain injury and progressive conditions. Others work specifically with the hand and upper limb after injury or surgery, on pain, movement and getting back to everyday use.

Going back to work

If your ability to manage at work has been affected, our vocational Occupational Therapy service can assess the job as well as the person. That means looking at the tasks themselves, the workstation and the wider working environment, then setting out what would need to change for the work to be done safely. Where an employer is involved, the OT can work with them directly on those changes.

Children and young people

Our paediatric OTs work with babies, children and young people who are finding daily activities difficult, whether or not there is a diagnosis. That takes in sensory processing, fine and gross motor skills, handwriting, attention, and managing emotions and behaviour, alongside everyday routines like feeding, dressing, toileting and sleeping. Our children’s Occupational Therapy service explains how an assessment works.

Referrals come from parents and carers, schools and SEND services, local authorities, NHS services, solicitors and case managers. You do not need a GP referral to arrange a private assessment.

How to arrange a private OT assessment

If any of this sounds like your situation, the next step is a short conversation about what you are finding difficult and where you are in the country. We will tell you which service fits, what it costs and how the referral works, before you commit to anything.

Make an enquiry and our enquiries team will get back to you.