Dear OT Community
I am writing to you from Namibia in Africa. A few of our paediatric OT's working in private practice have recently formed a forum. Things are getting really tough with the private medical insurance companies - up to now, we have claimed the largest portion of our services to our clients from the medical insurance companies (we call them medical aids). But now, with the massive influx of medical specialists into Namibia (and also because of some unethical billing throughout the medical profession), the medical insurance companies are under a lot of financial strain, reducing benefits of their members which means the number of sessions granted to OT for each child is being reduced drastically.
You can imagine how this affects the process of therapy, especially for our long-term clients such as kids with ASD and cognitive impairment.
The forum aims to put together a workable plan to advocate OT to the medical insurance companies, hopefully giving a chance to negotiate for more granted sessions.
We thought about perhaps recording more measurably the number of sessions needed to show improvement in functional abilities.
This is why I am writing to you to ask whether there are any paediatric OT's in this forum who use a standardized assessment tool to evaluate functional skills? In Namibia we don't have a specific tool measuring functionality - we evaluate the different parts of function individually, such as motor skills, visual perception and sensory processing, and then form a holistic picture of the child by integrating all the results.
Please let me know whether you are aware of any such tool being used somewhere in the world and whether we could get into contact with the OT's using this?
Thank you so much and kind regards
Karen Kunz
