Writing occupation-focused goals

Planning the implementation of enabling strategies is an essential process in the practice of occupational therapy. It is much more than a sequence of steps therapists employ to provide a service to their clients. It is an organisational structure that facilitates the professional reasoning process for conducting assessments, identifying goals, selecting strategies and evaluating outcomes. This chapter provides a linear structure for developing occupation-focused enabling strategies. This approach has been specifically developed to assist therapists to identify and write occupation-focused aims and goals, and to link strategies and evaluation methods directly to the outcome. If occupational therapy strategies are not carefully planned, they may lack focus on occupation, fail to directly address goals, and be ineffective in achieving desired occupational engagement outcomes. Therefore, planning is a skill all therapists must be competent in to ensure appropriate and effective service provision to the people who use their services.