Nursing and Occupational Therapy: Focus for the Future

The professions allied to medicine demonstrate considerable overlap when it comes to defining the unique aims, responsiblities and treatment methods of each. Research is needed in order to discriminate the particular quality and/or quantity of each professional contribution. This paper examines the areas of possible collaboration between nurses and occupational therapists by asking and debating several pertinent questions.

What evidence suggests that there might be differences between nurses and occupational therapists?

Pre-training

Nursing is frequently seen as offering a service to patients with acute problems (prevention or delay of death) whereas Occupational Therapy is traditionally viewed as being involved in long term rehabilitation (acquisition of independence skills, enhancement of social skills, etc.). However, no one can say precisely where the need for nursing plus the patient's efforts, as a complementary pairing, declines and the need for occupational therapy plus the patient's efforts should take over in the recovery process. Measures in this field are notoriously difficult since both nursing and occupational therapy may be added to a series of prior and/or concurrent treatments which may produce additive or cumulative effects in terms of the eventual outcome. Such problems highlight the importance to each profession of identifying and measuring all achievements that are legitimately deemed to be promoted by nurses and occupational therapists.

Areas of debateable responsibility are amendable to plotting on a series of dimensions, each having a continuum of dependence/independence of the patient under treatment. These dimensions, in turn, can be classified in many ways. For instance, the type of disorder yields possibilities of looking at physical, psychological or social aspects of illness and recovery. Attempts are urgently needed to identify the points of key ‘efficiency’ for the two professions on these continuums in order to ensure that we will work closely together in the most effective delivery of our professional skills.