Knowledge Check Therapeutic Relationships

Establishing effective therapeutic relationships is an extremely important part of our roles as occupational therapists. Engaging with our future clients and doing so in a way that allows them to trust us as their clinician can lead to better outcome in many different ways. In building therapeutic relationships some important things are to use empathy, positive nonverbal and verbal communication, open-ended questions and establishing good rapport with our clients. This will allow us to get to know more about our clients, which will help us to better treat them. In building therapeutic relationships as therapists, we must be constant teachers, learners, and stay up to date on all of the best evidence to back up our practice as well.