Visual Education and Occupational Therapy
Visual education is important when you want your geriatric patients to remember precautions. This helps improve their cognition, increases awareness, and decreases falls.
Education as a skilled treatment in rehabilitation can be beneficial if it is effective and therapeutic. Visual deficits and memory impairments are common barriers we see in older patients in occupational therapy. Visual learning increases carryover skills, safety, and technique. Utilizing redundant verbiage every treatment session eventually becomes white noise, which can be one of many reasons why you may not see progression in therapy. Visual Education can be very helpful and effective to increase functional performance.
Always remember we can easily remember all of the precautions because we are rehab therapists who live and breathe this stuff, but this information hard to remember especially for people who are not therapists and they have a million other medical issues to pay attention to.
Types of Visual Education:
- Handouts
- Return demonstration
- Visual Aids
- Visual Scanning
Visual education can be a effective treatment in helping your patient move more confidently, safely, and independently in their environments. The ultimate goal is to have a better grasp of the concept you are trying to teach the patient as well as increase carryover.