Life Needs Model of Pediatric Service Delivery

This model comprises of four components including Assistive Computer Technology (ACT) service delivery (evaluation and training), the provision of ACT devices, education, and coordination and collaboration. ACT service delivery includes evaluation, training, and coordination of technology services. A service delivery team includes an occupational therapist, computer specialist, education specialist, and augmentative communication specialist. The team is responsible for conducting assessment and providing training for students who are in needs.

This model is a service delivery model that aims to provide a framework for occupational therapists to design and evaluate services for people living with HIV. It focuses on designing and evaluating interventions that target outcomes in activity and social participation. It comprises of the following components, prominent features of living with HIV, service delivery principles, promising interventions, and person-environment interactions across micro, meso, and macro levels of the environment.

The model of occupational empowerment explicates how living in a disempowering environment can lead to a person’s maladaptive habits and unhealthy living. A disempowering environment includes unfavorable circumstances and problems such as poverty, substance abuse, physical abuse, violence, limited social support, etc. Living in the disempowering environment may lead to problematic factors such as homelessness, joblessness, limited educational opportunities, which further lead to occupational deprivation.

The Partnership for Change (P4C) model emphasizes the therapists’ partnership with the educators and parents to change the life and environment of a child who has motor difficulties (or developmental difficulties). The partnership focuses on the collaboration of building capacities for the teachers and parents in enhancing daily environment for the child. The core activities of occupational therapists under the P4C model are relationship building and knowledge translation with the school and parents. It consists of three steps. The first step is universal design for learning.

This model presents a hierarchy of family-therapist involvement in occupational therapy services, with associated attitudes, specific knowledge, and skills that enable therapists to operate at each level. 

The first level, no family involvement, outlines the traditional medical model of intervention. This level focuses on technical skills which are expected of entry-level therapists, with no awareness of the role of the family and client’s social context. It provides the basis for alternative types of family involvement.