My personal and professional experience with obesity ad bariatric surgery provides me a uinque viewpoint for understanding the need in the healhcare field for comprehensive post-bariatric surgery care. Most healthcare systems focus solely on the medical and nutritional aspects of weight loss after bariatric surgery. This focus limits the client as it does not address the modification of their occupations and maladaptive behaviors to ensure long-term success. The focus of my capstone is to create a program proposal to include occupational therapy intervention after bariatric surgery to incorporate what the clients value in their occupations into a program that builds new and healthy habits. The secondary focus of the capstone will be to analyze, plan, and project the business structure, cost factors and financial gains involved with adding occupational therapy into a bariatric sugical program. Through the introduction of this program, the goal is to integrate occupational therapy as a standard of care post-bariatric surgery to ensure the clients reintegrate into their daily occupations and modify maladaptive behaviors for long-term success.
