This text based course is a transcript of the live webinar titled, "Infant Massage: An Intervention for the Occupation of Family Social Participation", presented by Jennifer Pitonyak,PhD, OTR/L, SCFES, CIMI.
>> Jennifer Pitonyak: I was really pleased when OccupationalTherapy.com approached me about doing the seminar. Early in my career I took several continuing education courses on massage and manual therapy techniques, like myofascial release and NDT. I used those interventions with my clients who had neuromuscular disorders. Then as I gained experience in early intervention and the NICU, I developed an interest in family mental health and using massage for broader outcomes to work on wellness and family social participation. About four years ago, I pursued my certification to be an infant massage instructor and everything else has evolved from there in how I have integrated massage into my occupational therapy practice.
Introduction/Learning Objectives
I hope to really make the connection between our scopes of practice as occupational therapists, namely the occupation of family social participation, and how therapeutic touch, like massage, is related to psychosocial health and family wellness. Given that this is a webinar and not a hands-on experience, we will focus more on the evidence that supports the use of massage as a potential intervention for the psychosocial outcomes. I will give you an introduction to materials that you need to engage in massage, and some beginning protocols for thinking about using massage in your practice. At the end I will give you some examples of a few of the program settings where I have used infant massage to hopefully give you some ideas of how you can take massage from a preparatory technique to an occupational intervention.
Scope of Practice
Figure 1. This slide shows the scope of practice for OT in infant and family wellness programs.
There are two documents that I want to use to help illustrate our scope of practice. The first is our Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. This is where we are have our terminology, scope of practice, and the idea, that as occupational therapists, we want to address the roles and occupations of individuals. We also want to look more closely at social participation.
To start, the framework defines social participation as an organized pattern of behavior that is characteristic and expected of an individual or of a given position within a social system. That is the very broad general definition. Today we want to consider family social participation as parents and their children engaging in occupation together, and the framework defines that as engaging in activities that result in successful interaction in desired familial roles. This is based on the work of Mosey.
We know that we have to consider the family as part of our intervention plan. Family members take on a variety of roles, particularly as parents or caregivers. With those roles come additional occupations of caregiving and child-rearing. You can see on the slide some of those occupations that go along with these caregiver or parental roles. This is not all-inclusive list. Certainly we need to consider other areas of occupation that fall under the parent or caregiver role.
