Hi there. My name is Sarah. I'm an occupational therapist at The UD Project and have a passion for helping people live well in their homes, by considering the design of their environment and how that impacts people's ADLs, IADLs, roles, and routines. I am so excited to help you engage with this content to help boost your knowledge plus your patient and facility outcomes.

You may be wondering why I created these courses. Well, I worked in inpatient rehab for several years, and I know the importance of working toward patient independence before discharge. Unfortunately, with decreased length of stays and other constraints, I saw, and still see, a gap in care for providing important resources for a person to thrive in the next stage of their recovery.

Especially related to how they participate in their homes. Many of my patients were discharged to inaccessible homes. While I did as much as I could to help while I knew they were in rehab, I know I couldn't address everything with products and adaptive techniques, and that many would need additional home modifications now or down the road, to make their overall daily lives easier.

After time in inpatient rehab, I've taken a different direction in my OT journey. By assessing lodging facilities in a Colorado resort town, doing in-home evaluations with clients after therapy services had finished, and working toward collaboratively creating universally accessible home plans. A bigger picture problem I noticed was that most homes and communities across the US, whether they were older ones and the new ones being built, are not being prioritized with accessibility features that we all know people, will benefit from eventually.

My work as an OT has turned into helping people understand the value and need for more accessible homes within our communities that are new, and the reality that people are currently living in homes that just don't meet their needs.

Through lessons learned in each of these endeavors, my experience having a husband with a spinal cord injury, us being parents, and a lot of reflecting, with the help of my team have created online video-based courses about the topics of functional home design and how the environment can empower people to do their occupations well.

The OT profession has only barely scratched the surface of how we can provide people help in this part of their life. I'm here to make it easier for OTs to learn about housing accessibility, and then teach and share to help others. First, by deepening our knowledge of universal design and home modifications. Second, by educating patients during treatment, and family education, and discharge planning. And then finally, by sharing that same information with patients and other stakeholders for use in the future as a resource at discharge. I have seen the need for prioritizing accurate resources for patients and families to have easy access to the concepts when they go home, as they will often realize that their environment isn't a good fit for their needs long after they've been discharged from your facility.

Oftentimes as an inpatient therapist, I assumed that home health and even outpatient would focus more on the home accessibility pieces. But what I'm finding is that people are still struggling to use their homes even after the progression of therapy services stop, and they don't have a lot of guidance from people in the therapy world once they're out in the community.

What you're viewing now is a quick training guide to introduce you to these courses and help you as a therapist feel confident asking your patients questions about their homes, learning the content to help them, and then directing patients to portions of this resource that are most important to their situation.

The lessons are easily consumable, about five to 10 minutes long, which is fantastic for a busy therapist or student learning the content as well as fitting the information into your treatment sessions.

Up next, I'm gonna go into how to engage your patients in asking them about their homes. Give you some suggestions on where to start with the courses, how to find the content you wanna find, and tips for using this in your treatment sessions.