Best Practice Occupational Therapy for Children and Families in Community Settings

As the occupational therapy profession concerns itself with how people occupy their time during daily life, it is critical for occupational therapists who serve children to understand how to apply their knowledge and skills within the complex and varied environments of the community.

A core text for over 10 years, Best Practice Occupational Therapy for Children and Families in Community Settings, Second Edition by Dr. Winnie Dunn provides a clear insight into how to conceive, design, implement, and evaluate services that reflect core principles.

Best Practice Occupational Therapy for Children and Families in Community Settings, Second Edition provides the most current information about providing services within community settings, with material addressing early intervention, early childhood, school-age services, and transitions.

The context of this text is rooted in best practice principles from interdisciplinary literature and illustrates how occupational therapy professionals implement those principles in their everyday practices.

New Features of the Second Edition:

• Updated assessments, evidence, and appendices
• Case studies that illustrate the implementation of ideas in a practice situation
• Worksheets that outline each step in the occupational therapy process from what to include to how to provide rationale for team members, families, and consumers
• Tables and inserts that summarize key points
• Information regarding state and federal legislation to guide the occupational therapists in how to negotiate for best practice services within parameters of regulations
• Integrated throughout the text is the American Occupational Therapy Association’s Occupational Therapy Practice Framework
• Additional on-line resources that are available with new book purchases

Included with the text are online supplemental materials for faculty use in the classroom.

Best Practice Occupational Therapy for Children and Families in Community Settings, Second Edition contains many suggestions about how to practice the skills needed for evidence-based practice, making this the perfect resource for occupational therapy students, faculty, and practitioners who serve children and families.

Winnie Dunn, PhD, OTR, FAOTA is Professor and Chair of the Department of Occupational Therapy Education at the University of Kansas. Dr. Dunn holds a bachelor’s degree in occupational therapy and a Master of Science degree in special education-learning disabilities from the University of Missouri. She earned her doctorate in Applied Neuroscience from the University of Kansas.

She is a fellow of the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), has received the Award of Merit for outstanding service contributions to the profession, is a member of the Academy of Research of the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF), has received the A. Jean Ayres Research Award for her outstanding contributions to knowledge development, and was the Eleanor Clarke Slagle Lecturer in 2001 for her significant contributions to “conceptual and evidence based neuroscience research and practice.” She has served on the Commission on Practice, the Early Intervention, and School Based Practice Task forces of AOTA, has been the chair of the Research Development Committee of the AOTF, and has served on the National Board for Certification of Occupational Therapy (NBCOT).

Dr. Dunn has written extensively about service provision practices for children and families, with more than 100 articles and numerous books and book chapters to her credit. She also teaches internationally, serving as visiting professor in numerous programs around the world. Through her research, she has demonstrated the effectiveness of consultation and the use of theory to guide contextually relevant practice.

Her line of research about sensory processing in daily life has been very fruitful, producing the family of Sensory Profile assessments that identify distinct patterns of sensory processing in various groups of infants, toddlers, children, youth, adults, and older adults. These assessments are used internationally by professionals in many disciplines, and they have been translated into dozens of languages for use in research and practice programs. Most recently, she wrote a book for the public based on this research. Living Sensationally: Understanding Your Senses has been covered in international media and is currently translated into German and will soon be available in Hebrew.