Capacity Building & Improving Independent Living Skills

Occupational therapy can support you in building independent living skills, helping reduce your reliance on others. This typically begins with an occupational analysis, where we assess how you perform activities, the steps involved, and how factors such as the environment, the specific task, or your abilities may influence the process. We then work together to identify changes that can be made to help promote greater independence.

A key strategy used by occupational therapists to build independence is Activity Grading. This involves modifying tasks so they are neither too easy nor too difficult, creating an ideal challenge with the right level of support to ensure success. For example, instead of expecting you to remember the steps to bake a cake, we might provide a visual recipe for you to follow, rather than simply telling you each step. This approach can be particularly helpful for individuals who struggle with planning or sequencing tasks.

As your skills improve, the difficulty of the task can be gradually increased. For instance, once you can follow the recipe with ease, we might challenge you to follow it without prompts, or even combine two tasks at once or increase the complexity of the recipe.

But why use cooking as an example? In this case, cooking is used as a skill to improve through occupational therapy, especially for those aiming to gain independence, such as moving out of home (referred to as Task-Specific Therapy). However, practising complex occupations like cooking offers a wide range of benefits. The skills developed through one task can often be applied to others. For example, if someone has reduced hand strength, tasks like cutting and whisking can help improve their strength and coordination. Similarly, if someone wants to improve their planning skills, cooking provides an opportunity to practice this. This approach is known as Using Occupation as Therapy, where the activity (such as cooking) serves as a means to build and practice skills that are important for other areas of life.