As a second-year occupational therapy (OT) doctoral student, I’ve been pushed to answer the question, “What exactly is an occupational therapist?” At the same time, working as a research assistant in social work, I’ve found myself asking this question about what a social worker’s role is. The more I learn about both, the more I think our shared difficulty in answering isn’t a weakness, but rather a reflection of how far reaching each profession is. This overlap points out that OT, social work, and allied health professions more broadly need to be more intentional about defining and communicating what we do.
Both professions understand people within the context of their environments, relationships, and everyday lives, and both routinely work within and beyond a traditional medical model. An occupational therapist might help a client return to meaningful activity while also addressing home safety, transportation, caregiver wellbeing, or access to resources. A social worker might address psychosocial wellbeing while helping a client navigate housing, finances, family systems, or safety.
Neither role stays inside clear lines, which is part of why each can be hard to define from the outside. In an article regarding the professional identity of social work, Forenza and Eckert (2018) describe social work as an expansive profession working across “micro, mezzo, and macro levels,” which contributes to its difficulty developing a single professional identity. OT researchers have similarly found that professional identity in OT is shaped by occupation-centered practice, professional socialization, and the ability to connect theory to practice, with “generic, blurred, or emerging roles” cited as a specific challenge (Walder et al., 2021).
This overlap in roles and scope may be where meaningful collaboration can happen. Kuželková et al. (2025) describe OT and social work collaboration as important for keeping patients from getting lost in complex health and social service systems while reciprocally improving access to rehabilitation and psychological support. This has shifted my thinking on professional identity from being a boundary drawn around a profession, to clarity about what each person uniquely contributes to a shared team. If OTs solidify their identity in occupation and the person-environment-activity relationship, they can work alongside social workers without needing to facilitate resource coordination themselves. Social workers, then, can bring their expertise in systems and advocacy without absorbing every psychosocial need that comes up.
Snell et al. (2020) found that developing identity can start early, with professional identity and socialization as key developmental processes for allied health students. They also note that most existing research on the topic of professional identity focuses on medicine and nursing rather than fields like OT or social work. That gap points out that identity isn’t something only relevant after graduation and licensure. It’s built through coursework and clinical experiences as well as mentorship and the ongoing practice of articulating what our work is and why it matters.
A 2025 study of OTs and social workers found that both professions recognized collaboration as necessary for improving client functioning and social participation, even as limited time, weak information-sharing systems, or unclear role boundaries made it harder in practice (Kim et al., 2025). This supports that professional identity and interprofessional collaboration aren’t competing goals. Working across OT education and social work research, I see how often both professions are asked to treat the “whole person,” and how easily that responsibility can become confusing for clients, other providers, and even ourselves. A clear professional identity makes it possible to say, “this is what I bring, this is what my colleague brings, and here’s where we overlap.” Clarity is what turns collaboration into something intentional rather than something reactive or competitive.
Occupational therapy and social work sit in a space between health and social care as well as daily life, often working with the same people toward the same outcomes. That overlap isn’t a threat to either profession’s boundaries; it’s a reason to define those boundaries better and continue professional exploration. As I develop my own identity as an OT, I feel sure that my profession isn’t about knowing everything I’m capable of doing, but understanding the specific perspective I bring and recognizing when someone else’s perspective will make the care even better.
Our work at CHaSCI hopes to leverage the strengths of allied health professionals to demonstrate their importance in both direct clinical care and in advancing research and evaluation.
References:
- Forenza, B., & Eckert, C. (2018). Social worker identity: A profession in context. Social Work, 63(1), 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swx052
- Kim, H., Bae, J.-W., Park, S.-Y., Park, S.-J., Hong, J., & Jang, T.-Y. (2025). Occupational therapists and social workers: Differences in collaboration status and perceived necessity. Journal of the Korean Aging-Friendly Industry Association, 17(2), 33–42. https://doi.org/10.34264/jkafa.2025.17.2.33
- Kuželková, A., Vacková, J., Bendová, M., Sládková, P., Jirků, A., Pechoušková, K., & Mandátová, K. (2025). Basic aspects of cooperation between occupational therapists and social workers in the social environment of patients after an acquired brain injury. Kontakt, 27(1), 74–80. https://doi.org/10.32725/kont.2025.009
- Snell, R., Fyfe, S., Fyfe, G., Blackwood, D., & Itsiopoulos, C. (2020). Development of professional identity and professional socialisation in allied health students: A scoping review. Focus on Health Professional Education, 21(1), 29–56. https://doi.org/10.11157/fohpe.v21i1.322
- Walder, K., Bissett, M., Molineux, M., & Whiteford, G. (2021). Understanding professional identity in occupational therapy: A scoping review. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 29(3), 175–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2021.1974548