Free Clinical Tool
OT Scope Check
Run any vision finding through three questions and see whether it is an observation you can own, a diagnosis you must refer, or an action that belongs to another profession.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. Use initials or a code, never a student name.
1. Did you observe it, or did you infer it?
Can you state the finding purely as what the student did during an occupation: what you saw, timed, counted, or the student reported, with no underlying cause attached?
Test: could a second OT watching the same session write the same sentence? "Loses place 6 times in a 3-minute passage" passes. "Has a tracking disorder" does not.
2. Does the statement name a diagnosis?
Does your wording assign eye health status, refractive error, or a binocular/accommodative diagnosis: convergence insufficiency, amblyopia, accommodative dysfunction, CVI, and so on?
OTs may document that findings are consistent with a referral question. OTs do not name the disorder. Diagnosis belongs to optometry, ophthalmology, and medicine.
3. Is the next action inside OT scope?
Is your planned action occupation-centered: task grading, print and workstation adaptation, pacing, environmental and UDL supports, compensatory strategy training, documentation, or referral?
Prescribing or directing lenses, prism, filters, patching, or a vergence and accommodative therapy program is optometric practice. Carryover of an optometrist's program is only appropriate under written direction from that provider.
OT scope: Anything pointing to eye health, refractive error, or a binocular diagnosis is a referral, never a conclusion. The VPA™ produces observations, not diagnoses. Nothing in the VPA™ or in VML materials is optometric vision therapy, and nothing here recommends lenses, prism, filters, or patching. Full scope statement