Job Stress in Occupational Therapy: Coping Strategies, Stress Management Techniques and Recommendations for Change

Abstract

This article, the second in a series of two on job stress in occupational therapy, reports the results of 30 semi-structured interviews with a random sample of occupational therapists from the Bath District Health Authority and selected local authority social services departments. All 30 subjects had participated in a larger study which set out to identify the factors contributing to job stress in this professional group,1 and the follow-up interviews aimed to examine coping strategies which were used by the subjects in their work situation. This is an applied article, where the attempt is to distil the main findings of the combined studies (the postal survey and the interviews) to recover information that can be made available to occupational therapy managers and to clinical occupational therapists.