What Is an OTA, and When Should You Consider One?

An **Occupational Therapy Assistant (OTA)** delivers the sessions an Occupational Therapist has planned. The OT assesses and decides; the OTA does the weekly work and reports back.

If that sounds like the SLP/SLPA arrangement, it is — the same structure, applied to a different discipline.

What an OTA does, and does not

**Does:** runs planned sessions, adapts activities within the plan to keep a child engaged, records how the child responded, flags anything the supervising OT should know, and coaches a family on carrying a strategy between visits.

**Does not:** assess, diagnose, decide goals, or change the plan on their own judgment. If a child has plateaued or something new appears, that goes back to the OT.

When an OTA fits

**Good fit:** your child has been assessed by an OT, a plan exists, and what is needed now is consistent delivery over months. This is the largest category by some distance — most of the work in pediatric OT is repetition, and repetition is what an assistant-delivered model does affordably enough to sustain.

**Also a good fit:** the goals are practical and situational — dressing, mealtimes, a morning routine, handwriting — and the useful place to work on them is the home where they happen.

**Not the starting point:** nobody has assessed your child. An OTA cannot tell you what is going on or what to work on. That needs an OT, and it comes first.

**Escalate rather than continue:** a plateau, a regression, a new difficulty, or a plan that stopped making sense. Those belong to the supervising OT.

The cost and frequency trade-off

Assistant-delivered sessions cost less than therapist-delivered ones. For families paying privately or working within a funding envelope, that frequently decides frequency — and for young children, frequency tends to matter.

A useful way to think about it: the assessment and the plan are where the therapist's expertise is concentrated; the sessions are where consistency is. Paying therapist rates for consistency, when a supervised assistant can provide it, often means buying fewer sessions than the plan actually calls for.

That is a trade-off, not a rule. Some children genuinely need the therapist in the room.

What to check before engaging one

What Puffin is building

**Not bookable yet** — in development, with an interest list.

Puffin's OTA support is being built at **$80 per 50–60 minute session**, delivered in the home, working to a plan from an Occupational Therapist registered with the College of Health and Care Professionals of BC and listed on the RASP. Every specialist is CRRP vulnerable-sector cleared. It is designed to work alongside an OT your family already has — you should not have to leave a therapist who is working in order to change where sessions happen.