Several necessary shifts have been proposed in occupational therapy education, including antiracist pedagogies, inclusive teaching, competency-based education, and holistic admissions. These shifts are intended to prepare competent practitioners who serve diverse groups of clients and advocate for themselves and the profession. This shift may also call for significant changes to curriculum designs and instructional methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change may be the most pressing existential threat to human health and wellbeing in the twenty first century. In this paper, the authors provide context and critique on barriers to climate action in the United States and other high-income countries, including the profit-driven approach to health, consumerism, and the climate change countermovement. The reciprocal connections between occupational engagement and climate damage are examined from a lens of collective and irresponsible occupations and subsequent accountability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe basic needs of students may serve as unknown factors in academic engagement and well-being. Challenges in meeting these needs disproportionately impact underrepresented minority and first-generation students. The purpose of this pilot study was to explore the perceived presence and impact of basic needs on health, well-being, and academic engagement in occupational therapy students.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTheories, models, and frameworks provide the foundation for occupational therapy education, research, and clinical practice. While most have a systems approach focus, other factors, such as societal influences and structural inequities, also contribute to health. Using a cross-sectional design, this study identified the gaps in occupational therapy models of practice and presents a novel approach, the PAIRE (Recognize rivilege, cknowledge njustice, and eframe Perspective to Reach quity) Model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOccup Ther Health Care
January 2023
Critical thinking is the process of analyzing and evaluating thinking to make decisions. Critical thinking exposes assumptions, biases, and beliefs that influence clinical reasoning. This scoping review sought to explore instructional approaches for advancing students' critical thinking in healthcare education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Artifacts convey essential skills, tools, and concepts to students. Studies of artifacts can therefore illumine priorities for learning.
Objective: To describe the skills, tools, and concepts that assignment artifacts required students to learn, especially in relation to occupation.
Background: Older adults' health and quality of life, proxies for aging well, are tied to activity engagement. Recent research indicates studying the perspective of older adults through their personal stories is key to understanding the phenomenon of occupational engagement as experienced day-to-day.
Aim: To uncover the lived experience of older adults within their natural settings to better understand the phenomenon of activity engagement.
Purpose: To explore best practices for increasing cultural competency and reducing health disparities, the authors conducted a scoping review of the existing literature.
Method: The review was guided by 2 questions: (1) Are health care professionals and medical students learning about implicit bias, health disparities, advocacy, and the needs of diverse patient populations? (2) What educational strategies are being used to increase student and educator cultural competency? In August 2016 and July 2018, the authors searched 10 databases (including Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, and Scopus) and MedEdPORTAL, respectively, using keywords related to multiple health professions and cultural competency or diversity and inclusion education and training. Publications from 2005 to August 2016 were included.
Importance: Occupational therapy practitioners' professional identities and distinctive contributions to health care connect essentially to their knowledge of occupation. Thus, the strategies educators use to convey occupation to students and the perspectives embedded in those strategies are critical topics for researchers.
Objective: To generalize findings from a previous qualitative study of how educators in 25 U.
Occup Ther Health Care
October 2018
As the profession of occupational therapy enters a second century, its growth in an increasingly complex and globalized world requires an adaptive and diverse philosophical foundation. The existentialist school of thought offers a complementary focus, which enhances existing philosophical foundations of the profession and supports two major tenets: (1) humans as self-making beings always in the process of becoming and (2) emotions and feelings as foundations for being-in-the-world. This article explores these two themes both in the context of existentialism and occupational therapy, and then provides an examination of existentialist utility in occupational therapy practice, research, and education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: This study's objective was to describe curriculum-level strategies used to convey occupation to occupational therapy students.
Method: The study used a descriptive qualitative research design. Fifteen occupational therapy and 10 occupational therapy assistant programs participated in interviews, submitted curriculum artifacts such as syllabi and assignments, and recorded teaching sessions.
Aims: To explore the potential influence of the Stanford Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP) on social support in Parkinson disease (PD).
Methods: This was a quasi-experimental mixed methods design. Volunteers with PD (n=27) and care partners (n=6) completed the CDSMP, questionnaires of social support and self-management outcomes, and an interview about social support in relation to CDSMP participation.
Objective: The concept of occupation is core to learning occupational therapy, yet how occupation is taught has not been widely studied. We explored how occupation is addressed in 25 U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Occupation is considered core and threshold knowledge for occupational therapy, yet how it is conveyed through education is not well understood. This study examined how the concept of occupation was taught in occupational therapy and occupational therapy assistant curricula in the United States.
Method: Using a qualitative descriptive research design, in-depth interviews, video recordings, and artifacts of teaching occupation were collected from 25 programs, chosen using stratified random sampling.
Occup Ther Health Care
January 2017
Diversity is a fundamental element of the AOTA Centennial Vision and a critical aspect for the visibility, growth, and sustainability of the occupational therapy profession. In this article, the authors suggest that, while the profession has been aware of the need for a diverse workforce and has taken steps to increase diversity and cultural competency, a more structured, comprehensive, and action-oriented approach must be considered to address an issue which impacts professional roles and client engagement, satisfaction, and well-being. Informed by the value-added and mutual accommodation models of cultural diversity, the authors provide specific strategies and actions which promote diversity and inclusion at the personal, institutional/organizational, and professional levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe concept of occupation has experienced a renewal in the past 3 decades and is widely accepted as the core subject in occupational therapy. Professional education has a critical stewardship role in continually enhancing how occupation is taught and understood to enrich new occupational therapy practitioners' ability to grasp the purpose of the profession and reason clinically in complex practice environments. The authors discuss three questions that frame approaches educators can use to effectively centralize occupation in teaching and learning environments: (1) To what degree is a curriculum and its courses and class sessions subject centered? (2) To what degree do instructional processes create links to occupation? and (3) To what degree do instructional processes expose and promote complex ways of knowing needed for learning occupation? Keeping occupation in the foreground is important to facilitate new research, teaching methods, and curricular relevance to practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: A critical analysis of occupational therapy practice in the corporate health care culture in a free market economy was undertaken to demonstrate incongruence with the profession's philosophical basis and espoused commitment to client-centred practice.
Findings: The current practice of occupational therapy in the reimbursement-driven practice arena in the United States is incongruent with the profession's espoused philosophy and values of client-centred practice. Occupational therapy differentiates itself from medicine's expert model aimed at curing disease and remediating impairment, by its claim to client-centred practice focused on restoring health through occupational enablement.
Background: The context that supported occupational therapy's inception has been replaced with new challenges brought on by globalization and dramatic changes in health care. Thus, the profession's philosophical grounding needs to be reframed to (a) achieve balance between science-driven and holistic elements, (b) operate within larger contexts on problems brought on by sociopolitical and natural determinants of health, and (c) maintain an ethical identity across all arenas of practice.
Purpose: This paper presents a brief discussion of the philosophical underpinnings in occupational therapy's history, outlines new global challenges for the profession, and proposes a new framework to address these challenges through education, practice, and research.
Professions are organized around central concerns, or core subjects. Knowledge of a field's core subject is indispensable to effective practice, reasoning, and professional identity. In health professions education, however, core subjects are often obscured by the plethora of topics and skills that must be taught, rendering them largely implicit in the learning process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople who experience the toxic stress of recurrent traumatic events in childhood have a higher risk for mental and physical health problems throughout life. Occupational therapy practitioners have a remarkable opportunity to be involved in addressing this significant public health problem. As health care practitioners already situated in the community, we have a responsibility to lead and assist in establishing and implementing occupation-based programs and to nurture the links between the child welfare system and existing intervention systems.
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