Occupational therapists enable people of all ages to live life to its fullest by helping them promote health, and prevent—or live better with—injury, illness, or disability. Occupational therapy helps people do the things they want and need to do through the therapeutic use of daily activities.
Impact on Patient Care
Our team of occupational therapists use functional activity to improve patients’ lives. They provide services to inpatient, outpatient, and home health patients.
Providing occupational therapy services at Atchison Hospital is unique because of Atchison Hospital’s size. Because Atchison Hospital is small, it’s not uncommon that the occupational therapy (OT) team will start working with a patient as an inpatient, then work with that same patient through home health, and finally, work with that patient as an outpatient. They get to see the whole gamut of their patients’ recovery process.
Our OT team help patients recovering from a wide range of medical issues, such as hip and knee surgeries, heart attacks, strokes, COPD and other respiratory illnesses, and weakness caused by pneumonia, to name a few.
Occupational Therapy Team
Leigh Anne Savaiinaea
Outpatient OT
18 years
Wendy Campbell
Home Health/OT
11 years
Libby Wilson
Inpatient OT
5 years
Occupational Therapy Services
Inpatient services include helping patients with activities of daily living, like bathing, dressing, using the bathroom, cooking, and cleaning.
Outpatient services include working the smaller muscles of the upper body, arms, hands, shoulders, thumb replacements, carpal tunnel, and tendinitis. They incorporate exercise and pain management techniques.
The OT team also provides activities for our swing bed patients to keep them active and engaged and help make their hospital stays more pleasant. They try to do activities that are important to the patients and keep them entertained.
Meeting patients where they are to get them to where they want to be.
Each patient’s case is different. Their care is focused on more than just exercise: it’s about using everyday things that are important to the person to get them back to their normal. Occupational therapists have a holistic perspective, in which the focus is on adapting the environment and/or task to fit the person, and the person is an integral part of the therapy team.