What is the impact of wellbeing on the physical activities of occupational therapy for a child with dyspraxia?

Structured and supervised physical activities are engaged with during a child’s schooling career are included under the domain of PE (Bailey, 2005). Therefore, the investigation of occupational therapy (OT) within school was deemed an interesting approach to research the implementation of physical activities of OT. Also, as wellbeing is a key focus within schools at this time, it is important to determine what the impact of wellbeing would be on physical activities of OT.

This thesis provides a historical overview of OT, physical activity, dyspraxia and wellbeing in order to explain the trajectory of what is the impact of wellbeing on physical activities of OT for a child with dyspraxia.

This research involved a case study for over three school terms within a year for a child with dyspraxia. During this time, qualitative and quantitative observations were undertaken during OT sessions on Friday lunchtimes and a wellbeing questionnaire every Friday on this child. The analysis of findings demonstrated successful and unsuccessful body movements of the OT activities following the trends of wellbeing that Sue portrayed throughout the study.

Findings from this study showed that despite Sue having OT intervention to aid Sue’s access to everyday participation in life, her trends of wellbeing that were measured, varied in terms of positive and negative directions in accordance with what was going on in her life. As a result, other contributing factors such as parental influence and friends that affected wellbeing influenced successful and unsuccessful body movements of the physical activities of OT, making this study original and authentic, thus ensuring wellbeing is of the uppermost importance for the longevity of holistic development.