Ask a room of occupational therapists what wears them down and the list comes back fairly consistent. Very little of it is about the work itself, which most OTs still like doing. It is about everything arranged around the work.
Always having to explain what occupational therapy is
The profession has a persistent image problem. People hear occupational and assume it is about finding someone a job, or they file it alongside physiotherapy and move on. Every OT has had that conversation, usually more than once at the same party.
On its own it is a small thing. It becomes wearing across a career, and it has a cost beyond irritation: a colleague who does not understand what an OT does refers late, or not at all, and the person who needed the assessment waits longer.
The emotional weight of the work
The job puts you alongside people at difficult points in their lives, and you carry a good deal of detail about a good many situations. It does not switch off when you close the laptop.
You also get close to the people you work with, sometimes over months. Losing someone you have been supporting is genuinely hard, and there is not always an obvious place to put that.
Long hours
Pressure on statutory services, financial and staffing both, does not stay at an organisational level. It lands on individual caseloads. Working late stops being an exception and becomes the shape of the week, and exhaustion follows.
Productivity targets
This is the one OTs raise most. Working to a timeframe rather than to what the person in front of you actually needs is a difficult thing to do well.
It is not that having targets is unreasonable. It is that meeting them can mean knowingly delivering less than you are capable of, week after week. Over time that leaves good therapists with the feeling they are doing a bad job, which is both unfair and hard to shake.
The paperwork
Assessments generate reports, reports need writing and checking, and the pile does not go down. Most OTs accept documentation as part of the job and would not want it otherwise, because the report is what the recommendation rests on. What grates is how much of the week it takes.
What changes in independent practice
Independent practice does not solve all of this, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. You will still be explaining what an OT does. The emotional weight of the work goes with you wherever you do it. What changes is the share of it you control.
At Inclusion, you choose the hours you work, so the amount of work fits round the rest of your life rather than the other way about. We provide admin support, so there is someone to hand for the queries and the paperwork that does not need a therapist to do it. We manage caseloads, so you are not handed more than can be done properly. And we offer training and support, because an OT who is developing is a better OT. That is what working with us as an associate looks like in practice.
If you are thinking about it
Most people who go independent have been turning it over for a while before they ask anyone about it. If that is where you are, a conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It is worth finding out who we are and how we work before deciding whether it suits you.
Get in touch and tell us where you are working now and what is prompting the thought. We will give you a straight answer about whether it would be a good fit.