Occupational therapy
therapy to increase skills related to work or independent living
Occupational therapy (OT), also known as ergotherapy in Europe, is a healthcare profession that helps people take part in the everyday activities, or occupations, that are important for daily life. These occupations include self-care tasks, work, school, social participation, and leisure activities.
Occupational therapists work with people who experience illness, injury, disability, or age-related changes that limit their ability to function independently. They assess a person's needs, set goals, and use everyday activities as therapeutic tools. Therapists may also modify tasks, recommend adaptive equipment, or adjust the physical or social environment to support participation.
Occupational therapy began developing into a formal health profession in the early twentieth century. Occupational science, the academic study of humans as 'doers' or 'occupational beings', was developed by interdisciplinary scholars, including occupational therapists, in the 1980s.
The World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT) defines occupational therapy as a "client-centred health profession concerned with promoting health and wellbeing through occupation. The primary goal of occupational therapy is to enable people to participate in the activities of everyday life. Occupational therapists achieve this outcome by working with people and communities to enhance their ability to engage in the occupations they want to, need to, or are expected to do, or by modifying the occupation or the environment to better support their occupational engagement."
Occupational therapy is classified as an allied health profession in many countries.
The public source identifies “Occupational therapy” as therapy to increase skills related to work or independent living. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Occupational, therapy and increase.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q380141. The Library of Congress control number is sh85093850. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Occupational therapy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.