Care Specialties & Departments
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Occupational therapy

Licensed occupational therapists (OTR/L) at Children’s Minnesota are trained experts in evaluating children, setting up individual treatment programs and working with families and other professionals. Children receiving occupational therapy (OT) may have difficulties with:

  • Development of physical motor skills
  • Cognitive and visual perceptual skills
  • Sensory integration and processing/modulation sensory information from their environment
  • Feeding and swallowing deficits and difficulties
  • Deficits with their abilities to do self care skills
  • Decreased strength, endurance and range of motion of muscle and joints
  • Adaptive equipment needs.

An OTR/L sees children with various diagnoses that can include

  • Developmental delays
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
  • Down Syndrome
  • Traumatic brain injury
  • Stroke
  • Brain tumor
  • Complex medical history that is affecting development
  • Medically fragile child
  • Feeding problems
  • Orthopedic conditions
  • Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Oncology
  • Sensory integrative disorders
  • Other medical conditions that affect children from obtaining appropriate functional skills.

Occupational therapy services/programs

Occupational therapists at Children’s are proud to offer individual treatment sessions to work on skill development in their deficit areas:

When is an occupational therapy evaluation recommended?

If a family has concerns about their child’s:

  • General level of performance with motor skills, visual perceptual and task completion
  • Ability to be involved and active with their self care skills (dressing, grooming)
  • Delays or difficulty playing with toys and others
  • Decreased strength, endurance and range of motion
  • Ability to organize, calm self and cope with information that they perceive from their environment (sensory processing)
  • Feeding and swallowing
  • Need for splints, adaptive equipment or positioning devices

Talk with your physician about an OT evaluation to address these concerns. When a parent/caregiver has concerns about one or several of these areas, a referral can be initiated by calling any of our sites. An intake coordinator will take the necessary information and mail a packet to be completed before the evaluation. The evaluation will then be scheduled with an OTR/L who will complete their 60 minute evaluation using appropriated evaluation tool(s) to help identify area(s) of deficits or/and delays to create an individual treatment plan and goals.

At Children’s, we believe that the family should be closely involved with the child’s therapy. We have observation rooms for caregivers, however, being in the same room while their child is receiving therapy services will allow for increased involvement and carry over of care. Discussion of progress, recommendations and home programming will be provided to allow for carryover into their home environment for maximum benefit from therapy services.

Occupational Therapy Team Evaluations

Occupational therapists are part of the following multidisciplinary teams at Children’s:

Occupational therapy developmental milestones

Download brochures with information about occupational therapy milestones and activities for promoting developmental skills: