Functional Assessments
Functional capacity assessments also known as FCA's, are specialist assessments conducted by a qualified occupational therapist to gain insight into your abilities to help you achieve independence in your daily life. A functional assessment's main purpose is to identify your functional abilities, what your strengths are and how you live your day to day life.
A functional assessment can be a long process and may take a number of sessions, assessments and time to gather enough information to formulate a finalised functional assessment report for you to use in helping you achieve your goals. Functional assessment reports are often used by the NDIS, disability providers, healthcare professionals, insurers or other statutory government programs to help assist you in providing further support to help you live your life.
What’s involved in a Functional Assessment?
Your Occupational Therapist will start by meeting with you to get to know you and better understand your goals for independent living. From there your Occupational Therapist may conduct formal or informal assessments to help gather more information for the assessment process. Informal assessments may involve observing your routines and ability to complete daily living tasks.
Where possible your Occupational Therapist may continue to gather further information about any formal diagnoses, disabilities or other conditions that may affect your functional ability. This further information may be collected in the form of reports, letters from your specialists, formal assessments, qualitative data or by meeting with some of your most trusted providers or supporting people.
Once the functional assessment is complete, you will be provided with a completed Functional Assessment Report that will include all of the observations and assessment information that has been collected by your Occupational Therapist. This report can then be used to help explain your abilities and strengths and where you may need support with independent living activities. The aim of the functional assessment report is to help your most trusted supporting people, healthcare providers, the NDIS and health insurers understand your abilities, what you may need help with, what your goals are and any recommendations that you may need for further support.