Welcome to InfOT! Today we will talk about
the Australian Occupational Performance Model! The OPM started developing by
Christine Chapparo & Judy Ranka in the now called University of Sydney in 1986.
It is based on some general assumptions about human occupations, human performance
and humans as self-organizing systems. The assumptions about human occupations
include the holistic belief that people have three interacting elements: mind, spirit
and body. When engaging in occupations, it provides us with a sense of reality,
mastery, competence, autonomy and temporal organization. These occupations can
promote health and an occupational identity. The second assumption is about human performance.
In the Occupational Performance Model, performance isn’t just an action, or the end product of
some process. Performance is the way we react under certain circumstances or when we
fulfill a purpose. As the authors of the OPM state “performance is assumed to go beyond
“doing” to incorporate “knowing and being”. The self-organization assumption means that people
are creating patterns of behaviours. The model sees people as a set of complex subsystems. This
means that any behavior occurs in response to how these subsystems interact with the environment.
As many occupational therapy models do, the OPM revolves around the relationship between
the person, the environment and the occupation. It has 8 major constructs: occupational
performance, occupational performance roles, occupational performance areas, components
of occupational performance, core elements of occupational performance,
environment, space and time. Let’s dive a little bit
deeper with each construct. Occupational performance: according to the OPM,
every purposeful action that we do and is related to daily living is occupational in nature.
Performance includes motor, physical, mental and emotional processes. The authors state that
performance is the ability to perceive, desire, recall, plan and carry out roles, routines, tasks
and subtasks for the purpose of self-maintenance, productivity, leisure and rest in response to
demands of the internal and external environment. Occupational Performance Roles: Roles are by
nature a complex set of behaviors that we do, in order to be socially involved and productive.
Usually, there are family roles, social roles, occupational, cultural and sexual-personal roles.
The OPM states that as occupational therapists, our goal is to preserve, maintain and
develop valued occupational roles. Moving on to the occupational performance
areas: the OPM uses 4 main categories of performance areas: self-maintenance occupations,
productivity/school occupations, leisure/play occupations and rest occupations.
Self- maintenance occupations are the routines or tasks that help us
preserve our health and well-being, such as dressing, cooking, taking medication.
Productivity/school occupations are the tasks that can support us through the production
of goods or the provision of services. Leisure/play occupations are the tasks that
promote entertainment, creativity, celebration. Rest occupations refer to the purposeful
pursuit of non-activity, such as relaxation. Occupational performance components: this term
refers to both the human components and the task components. Each person has various physical,
psychosocial, cognitive, sensory and motor skills and each task has the same components as
well. We need to focus and analyze the person’s and task’s component in order to better
understand human occupations and intervene. Core elements of occupational performance:
as mentioned before, the OPM believes that there are three core elements that
interact with each other and promote health and well-being: spirit, mind and body.
The spirit element refers to the sense of harmony for us, it is our hope and search for meaning.
The mind element is the core of our conscious and unconscious intellect that
helps us understand and reason. The body element refers to the tangible
physical elements of human structure. External environment: according to
the OPM, environment is categorized in physical, sensory, cultural and social.
Space: the OPM uses this term to describe the space that surrounds us both externally and
internally. It refers to the physical matter and the person’s view of experience of space.
Last construct is time: time is defined as a system of relating
one successive event to another. It is categorized in physical time and felt time.
Those were the main aspects of the Australian Occupational Performance Model. All information
was found in the original article here: Thank you for watching InfOT! If you liked
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