Robin’s Home clients get occupational therapy
The occupational therapy profession got its start in 1917, when the United States War Department employed reconstruction aids to help soldiers who were returning home from their World War I deployments to recover from what, at the time, was called shell shock.
For the past 16 weeks, students in Slippery Rock University’s occupational therapy program have worked with clients of Robin’s Home once a week to offer methods to help cope with stress in healthy ways, bringing the story “full-circle.”
One of the clients in the session Friday, April 25, Air Force veteran Stanley Brockman, said that even just learning how to better plan his own leisure time from the students has been constructive.
“When I come here, I feel it is helping me,” Brockman said. “I feel that it's teaching me things. Every time I come here I feel like I accomplished something.”
Miranda Virone, program director of the Doctor of Occupational Therapy Program at SRU, said occupational therapy is an evidence-based practice that aims to help individuals focus on mental and physical health, bridging the gap between the two. She said providing occupational therapy can be particularly helpful to veterans, who may have unaddressed issues sometimes worsened by individual factors.
“We’re looking at their mental health, physical health and we’re also looking at social determinants of health,” Virone said. “So food insecurity, housing insecurity, employment factors, health care access — all those things that are impacting their ability to work or pursue education or their social activities.”
According to Virone, even though occupational therapy has been a practiced profession for more than 100 years, Pennsylvania does not recognize doctors of occupational therapy as medical providers — a designation she said she hopes to advocate for.
“In the state of Pennsylvania, the department of health and human services (DHHS) doesn’t even recognize occupational therapy as a provider of mental health services, which is really sad,” Virone said. “I’ve made it a mission of mine to change some of that language with DHHS.”
Virone’s sharing of this information April 25 caught Mary Chitwood, executive director of Robin’s Home, off-guard. Chitwood said it is already difficult for some of her clients, whom are all military veterans and their families, to access services. She said improved access to occupational therapy could better help them navigate the systems of health care they already deal with.
“We’ll work with them one-on-one, but a lot of times we connect them to multiple agencies because of the different needs that they have,” Chitwood said.
Because doctors of occupational therapy don’t have mental health designation in Pennsylvania, Virone said people cannot bill occupational therapy services to insurance within the state. Other states, however, do recognize doctors in the profession as mental health providers, so Virone said Pennsylvania has models to work with to change state language.
“The only way you could access us outside of this environment would be if you got hurt or injured,” Virone said. “At the national level, our national organization recognizes us as providers, many other states recognize us as providers, so we’ve got a lot of work to do to advocate.”
Virone said many people also are unaware of what occupational therapy is, especially when it is lumped in with mental health therapy or physical therapy. She said having students work in the community with organizations like Robin’s Home has helped demonstrate what doctors in the job do and how the practice works.
“It is very important for us to help people in the community understand that we have the knowledge and capability to be in that sector, and we need to do a lot of advocacy with our legislators to help pursue that,” Virone said.
The session on April 25 at Robin’s Home had a group of students working with three veteran clients of the nonprofit, two of whom had attended at least a majority of the sessions over the course of 16 weeks.
Maybe it’s because she lives in Pennsylvania, but Jennifer Stys, a client of Robin’s Home who served in the Army until 1998, said she didn’t have the option to receive occupational therapy after her exit from the service.
“They didn't have anything like this when I got out,” Stys said.
Stephen Bergmann, a client of Robin’s Home, also said that although he was aware of occupational therapy because of his schooling, he didn’t know how helpful it could be to him. He, along with Brockman and Stys, applauded the SRU students for their work, which ended Friday, May, 2.
“As a vet that deals with stress and a recovering alcoholic, it helps,” Bergmann said. “It actually helps, because each of the weeks deal with a different situation with what you’ve gone through.”
Chitwood said the veterans who took part in the sessions with the students “opened up a lot” over the 15 weeks they had been working together. She also agreed with Virone who said experiencing working with military veterans would probably help the students in their future careers, because of the needs veterans may bring to the sessions.
“A lot of the veterans they are working with, they have all that stuff,” Chitwood said. “For students to have all this knowledge about all these aspects that fall under that OT (occupational therapy) umbrella, it really has been able to benefit the veterans.”
Professional-level occupational therapists normally work one-on-one with clients, but Virone said the group sessions the students led still mimicked that format. Additionally, having group sessions with the veterans helped them open up with the students, because they could talk out their thoughts and feelings on topics the students brought up.
“When they’re working one-on-one, they’re addressing many different factors that roll into their day-to-day functioning,” Virone said.
Brockman, who said the April 15 session was only his third with the SRU students, was sad to see that the 16 weeks was coming to an end, and wished that he had gotten into occupational therapy sooner.
Virone also said that occupational therapy could be a proactive way of treating mental and physical health issues, because it gives people the tools to manage some of their internal emotions, stress and time management.
“We are better off preventing people from becoming unwell than treating them after they have become unwell,” Virone said.
