Understanding occupation and humans as occupational beings is essential to practicing as an occupational therapist. This unit focuses on the relationship between occupation health and well-being that supports occupational therapy practice from a lifespan perspective. Students will adopt an occupational perspective of humans as occupational beings and consider lifespan changes in cognitive, behavioural, emotional, psychosocial, and occupational changes along with understanding disruption to occupation through disability, illness or occupational deprivation. Students will develop skills of client-centred perspective, observation, interviewing, culturally sensitive communication, and critical appraisal of the literature to understand humans' engagement in occupations throughout the life span. Through self-directed learning, group discussions, experiential activities, self-reflection and interactive teaching, students will investigate and critically evaluate how different contexts influence occupational engagement and explore how and why some people are deprived of occupational justice. Problem based learning will be used and students will critically appraise literature and research to work through case scenarios over the semester.
There will be a minimum of 24 hours of practice education via simulation incorporated in the on campus intensive program, which includes hurdle assessment tasks. The on-campus intensive for this unit will be aligned with the intensives for OCC511 and OCC512, so students will need to attend a total of 72 hours over 2-weeks.
