The Role of the COTA in Physical & Developmental Disabilities
Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant (COTA) is a certified position that provides people with an opportunity to assist Occupational Therapists directly in the setting through communication with OT patients and their guidance. Thus, when it comes to working with adolescent patients with cerebral palsy, the primary role of COTA is to help the children perform social interactions and academic performance within a classroom environment.
This assistance comes in a variety of forms, from being a so-called “study buddy” who guides adolescents through the working process to monitoring a child’s behavior during any kind of social interaction with peers and educators. The direct services of occupational therapy include the endeavors performed explicitly during the learning process. These include giving task instructions to an individual or a group of children, interacting in terms of communication, and securing immediate feedback. The indirect services, in their turn, account for the monitoring and evaluation of the patients’ progress, along with adjusting the curriculum according to the observations.
When assessing the current state of the population’s progress within the classroom setting, COTA plays a vital role in terms of collecting empirical data on the adolescents’ behavior and effects of occupational therapy. Indeed, the roles of OT and OTA/COTA are delineated in such a way that the former is more focused on providing indirect services such as creating a tangible treatment plan and classroom curriculum, whereas COTA/OTA are concerned with securing direct services and communication with the patients. In such a way, they are responsible for assisting adolescents in terms of academic progress, social interaction, and development of such IADLs as time management, fundamental finance management, and chores training. Thus, COTA provides OT with empirical outcomes of the therapy interventions in order to foresee further actions.
Models of Practice in Physical & Developmental Disabilities
One of the most widely used models of practice in terms of occupational therapy for adolescents with cerebral palsy is the Model of Human Occupation (MOHO) outlined in 1980 by Dr. Gary Kielhofner (Dehghanizadeh et al., 2020). This model defines that the concept of human occupation is manifested by three components: volition, habituation, and performance capacity. When analyzing the notion of cerebral palsy through the prism of the aforementioned constituents, it becomes evident that the performance capacity of adolescents is limited in terms of occupation.
Therefore, it is vital to dwell on the aspects of their physical and social environments as major means of shaping their motivation to perform actions. According to the researchers, when planning a meaningful intervention for patients with cerebral palsy, the primary objective is to define the actions through which volition, or patients’ motivations, will be shaped and addressed (Dehghanizadeh et al., 2020).
Considering the fact that there are two major types of motivation, the volition itself, or intrinsic motivation, and the environment, or extrinsic motivation, it is imperative to define the features of both constituents in order to outline the ways to connect them for the sake of better outcome. Thus, the introduction of occupational therapy in the classroom guided by the COTA’s assistance is a beneficial way to provide a productive environment for adolescents’ external motivation through encouragement and observation of others. Moreover, communication with adolescents provides COTA with a better perspective on how to motivate each child according to their desires and functional goals they are willing to perform with no external support in the long-term perspective.
Reference
Dehghanizadeh, M., Khalafbeigi, M., Akbarfahimi, M., Yazdani, F., & Zareiyan, A. (2020). Exploring the contributing factors that influence the volition of adolescents with cerebral palsy: A directed content analysis. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 1-11.