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The American Occupational Therapy Association: The new 'Concern Troll' in school-based mental health
Concern Troll: (noun) A person or persons who pretends to be 'concerned' about something and talks about it, all the while serving to actually disrupt the legitimate concerns and activities of people who are trying to address problems. Concern trolls are particularly skilled in derailing conversations, conflating issues, and leading people off track.*****AOTA recently released a new document on use of restraints and seclusion related to school based practice.  I will not link that document because I believe that it is fundamentally flawed and does not represent the thinking of many people who actually practice in scho...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - February 24, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: Disability rights OT practice Source Type: blogs

Can occupational therapists predict the future?
There is ongoing debate on the AOTA forums about move to an entry level doctorate.  Within that debate there is repeated discussion about the 'future.'  I am very interested in the concept that occupational therapists should attempt to 'focus more on what COULD and SHOULD be different for practitioners graduating in the future.'Prognostication is an interesting endeavor, and I am wondering if this is something that most occupational therapists really have the skill set to accomplish.  I don't believe that there is evidence to support OTs having these skills.R. Buckmister Fuller, who in my opinion was a treme...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - February 24, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education Source Type: blogs

Can use of an occupational justice model in an American context result in accusations of professional misconduct?
Conceptual practice models are interrelated bodies of theory, research, and practice resources that are used by OTs to guide practice (Kielhofner, 2009). One such conceptual practice model is the Occupational Justice Model (Townsend, 1993; Townsend and Nillson, 2010).  According to these sources, the Occupational Justice Model is framed around the concept that injustice occurs due to inherent governance and social structures that allegedly restrict the occupational performance of some populations and individuals.Concepts associated with occupational justice models have filtered into some official documents of the Amer...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - February 12, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs

From Social Gospel to the New Deal: A values juxtaposition that has been whitewashed by OTs
I was interested to see some comments from Dr. Elizabeth Townsend (2015) in an online forum asking "How are we building leadership for key posts at universities in support an occupation focus - both in the science and therapy of occupation?"  She asked this question in context of an open position at Dalhousie's School of Occupational Therapy in Halifax, Nova Scotia but was interested in a more general sense of how to build leadership outside of large metropolitan areas.  This interested me because I have been studying recruitment and spread of occupation workers at the time of the founding of the occupational th...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - February 10, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Source Type: blogs

Follow up on 'Ways you will be paid'
Follow up to PTE Speech in 2012: Ways you will be paid.I said in that speech that "The people who need you the most might not be able to pay you the most."  I thought about that this morning, because several things that I did are not 'reimbursable.' The idea of my talk to those students was to tell them that over the longer course of their careers that it is likely that they will make enough money to repay their student debt, but that it would be short-sighted to measure success in monetary terms because sometimes the ways you are paid can't be identified as a quantifiable amount in your Account Receivables, or it mig...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 22, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: ABC Therapeutics health insurance OT practice Source Type: blogs

The hands of a pediatric occupational therapist
When I get home from work I have things to do, like everyone else, and sometimes those things make my hands dirty.  Sometimes it is some minor maintenance on my car, or repairing something in the house, or doing a little gardening.  I know that I have to scrub my hands clean after these activities so that there is no evidence of dirt or paint or grease.  I keep my fingernails very short for precisely this reason.What would I tell a parent the next day - that I have the residual stain of grease on my hands because I was elbow deep into my engine compartment the night before?  I suspect that most parents ...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 21, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT practice Too much information Source Type: blogs

The impossibility of standardized international theory in occupational therapy
I was interested to read the comments of Dr. Moses Ikiugu who is a candidate for AOTA delegate to WFOT.  His full post addressing the AOTA's future priorities in context of the Centennial Vision can be found here.First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Ikiugu for sharing this thoughts because this is an important topic and not all candidates take the time to document their positions.One of his more interesting comments was a call for WFOT to develop and support  theory-based clinical decision-making.  He states: The hallmark of professionalism is the ability to explain how what we do in the process of provi...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 14, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs

Attending to the Manifesto: The importance of idiographic data collection in pediatric occupational therapy
The occupational therapy profession is unique because it is positioned as a stepping point to help people escape the despair of a liminal disability state and move toward the function that people wish to achieve, for themselves or for their children.I have written previously on the occupation of writing and the notion of interactivity through written text.  I have come to understand over time that parents are Manifesto-writers, often taking pen to page to attempt to make sense of their parenting occupations.  I frequently evaluate children and in that context am handed Manifestos of parents who have so much to sa...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 13, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT practice parenting Source Type: blogs

The professional abandonment of people who have developmental disabilities
Last year I bumped face first into a gnawing problem.  I was discussing practice trends in a professional context with an impressive panel of colleagues who were subject matter experts.  I raised the topic of the role of OT in planning transition services for adults who have developmental disabilities, and the more general topic of services to adults who have developmental disabilities was bantered about.My own personal perspective is that OT has a critical role in providing services to this population, and in fact concerns about adults who have developmental disabilities have been discussed in this blog more &nb...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 9, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: Disability rights health insurance OT practice Source Type: blogs

Reflections on inclusiveness for those who would be leaders
I was interested to read Dr. Braveman's blog post yesterday on Triple Aim.  In that post he stated "What did surprise me was the call for volunteer leaders to stop sharing their opinions and perspectives on such issues with the rationale that the issues can be interpreted by some as political and partisan."  You can read the whole post at http://otconnections.aota.org/community_blogs/b/brentbraveman/archive/2015/01/08/why-we-should-hear-more-about-health-policy-issues-such-as-the-triple-aim-of-healthcare.aspxHe doesn't reference what 'call' he was referring to, but I would like respond to that statement because o...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 9, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: health insurance OT practice policy Source Type: blogs

Enough is enough: Stop the politicization of the American Occupational Therapy Association
A recent article published in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy furthers the politicization of the professional association by issuing another full-throated endorsement of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 'Triple Aim.' Leland et.al. (2015) state that "Failure of the profession to clearly demarcate what constitutes high-quality occupational therapy and demonstrate its contribution to the broader patient outcomes that value-based care will measure may marginalize occupational therapy in the rapidly changing health care environment."Unfortunately, the authors align the concept of 'value' with the IHI...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 6, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: health insurance OT practice policy Source Type: blogs

Time to update the AOTA Position Paper on Nondiscrimination and Inclusion
Politically controversial conversations continue to spew from the social media accounts of AOTA leaders.  These conversations represent perspectives that are not reflective of the broad membership and are highly partisan.  The steady stream of ideological thinking is concerning because it represents a pattern where some leaders don't know how to separate their personal political inclinations from the mission of a diverse professional association. We often associate topics of diversity and nondiscrimination and inclusion in racial or ethnic or religious perspectives.  However, in what is supposed to be a poli...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - December 18, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT practice philosophy policy Source Type: blogs

Why there is not much more to say about the NYS Early Intervention Program
I got an interesting question in email today so I decided I would answer it publicly.  The email asked:You used to write a lot about early intervention, but there hasn't been much on that topic lately.  Providers are still struggling, there are provider shortages in some areas, lots of people lost their businesses and either went into agencies or gave up on early intervention.  Are you still working in this area and will you still be writing about how we are struggling with early intervention?Here is my answer:The reason why I don't write about early intervention as much anymore is because everything that I ...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - December 17, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: health insurance Source Type: blogs

The incompatibility of population-based public health models with the occupational therapy profession
The following Twitter conversation underscores the problems with use of a population health model in an occupational therapy context:Framing a conversation about the need for older drivers to consider their abilities underneath a context of population statistics is in direct conflict with the profession's Core Value of respect for patient autonomy and individuality.Although it may be true that there are descriptive statistics about driving safety, numbers of accidents, and other factors associated with elderly drivers, when we lead our conversations with talk about the broad population we are adopting a potentially ageist ...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - December 2, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: Disability rights OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs

Pushing back against a 'Fourth Paradigm' in the occupational therapy profession
Occupational therapists have a century long tradition of identity confusion and that has been complicated by incrementalism in how the profession defines its scope of practice.  A significant victory against incrementalism was realized in the 2014 Fall Representative Assembly Meeting when the Philosophy of Education document that was proposed was not supported, but an amended document passed that removed references to the 'occupational needs of institutions.'  The amended document now reads: "Occupational therapy (OT) education prepares occupational therapy practitioners to address the occupational needs of indi...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - November 20, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs