Occupational Therapy Practice Framework

The Fidler’s Life Style Performance Model focuses on knowing and understanding a person’s total activity repertoire within the context relevant to his/her life. This model provides practitioners a complete view of the client and his/her environment. It aims to bridge the gaps among the practice, philosophic constructs of holism, personal relevance, and quality of life.

Data Driven Decision Making (DDDM) is a framework for therapists to implement clinical reasoning within occupational therapy process and has a focus on the use of observation, testing and intervention results to guide and measure outcomes. This framework consists of 11 steps. Step 1, the therapists have to identify the participation challenges and goals. In step 2, therapists need to describe the level of the client’s functioning in each part of the body or the brain.

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. 

The Occupational Therapy Intervention Process Model is a model that guides therapists to use top-down, client-centered, and occupational-based approaches to assessment and intervention. In this model, assessment begins with an initial referral or a chart review. Therapists then meet and have an interview with clients in order to build the client-centered performance context and to gather relevant information and identify the clients’ goals. Next, a top-down approach is used to evaluate the situation with considerations of the clients’ diagnosed conditions.

This framework describes different aspects of cognitive strategy use to support practitioners’ clinical reasoning about clients’ reasoning and successful strategy use. It divides strategy use into four aspects, relevant to the task, each rated by therapists’ observation. The first aspect, prerequisites for effective cognitive strategy use, relevant prior to a task, includes the person’s strategy knowledge, strategy repertoire, strategy beliefs, anticipation and recognition of needs, and strategy generation and selection.