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Notes on the AOTA Continuing Competence Standards Draft
The American Occupational Therapy Association has a Commission on Continuing Competence and Professional Development (CCCPD).  The CCCPD is conducting a 5 year review of its standards on continuing competence.  This is a good opportunity to assess the AOTA efforts in this area.Links to the draft document and a survey can be found here: http://www.aota.org/Publications-News/AOTANews/2014/CCCPD-standards-review.aspxHere are my concerns with the document:1. I find the document to be rather vague, and the standards are not evidence-based.  There is no citation that provides information on how these standard...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - November 11, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: competency OT practice Source Type: blogs

Why students will be making elevator speeches to define OT for another 100 years
A new day, a new document, a new definition for the profession:For many years, the American Occupational Therapy Association has stated that students need to promote the profession by developing an effective 'elevator speech' explaining occupational therapy. This essay explains that the reason why students will be making elevator speeches for the next 100 years is because the leaders of the profession keep changing definitions about what OT is and who it serves.+++There is a new draft document on The Philosophical Base of OT Education that is going to be debated and voted on by the Representative Assembly.  The curren...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - October 31, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs

Comments on 'Validity of Sensory Systems as Distinct Constructs'
Chia-Ting Su and Diane Parham (2014) wrote an interesting article that appears in this month's American Journal of Occupational Therapy.  Their study involved use of confirmatory factor analysis to test constructs within sensory integration theory.  Results of their analysis have rather broad implications and raise many important questions.A highly popularized notion based on Dunn's (2001) Slagle lecture is that sensory processing can be identified as occurring within different systems where there might be over or under responsiveness to incoming stimuli.  Su and Parham applied data to this model and could n...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - October 21, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT practice sensory integration Source Type: blogs

A syllabus and reference list regarding attempts to redefine the occupational therapy profession
The lynchpin of this conversation goes back to the patient v. client debates which quite clearly have not been resolved.  I think it is important to look at those issues very carefully.  Client-based ethics are simply different than patient-based ethics, and the more that we walk down paths of client-based ethics the more risks we take of straying too far from our roots, as we were clearly warned by Reilly (1984) and Yerxa and Sharrott (1985).It should be very interesting to note that the entire argument for client-based ethics as originally made by Herzberg (1990) revolved around the allegedly 'faulty' logic of ...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - October 13, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education philosophy Source Type: blogs

Investigation into the Mendability program
On a professional occupational therapy forum some participants were asking for more information about the Mendability program, which is a 'sensory enrichment' therapy for autism.  I decided to post my response here for broader distribution.+++Here are some additional resources so  people can learn more about Mendability. Kim Pomares and Eyal Aronoff are the co-founders of Mendability.  Pomares is a Social Media and Content Development Creator and Aronoff is co-Founder of Quest Software.  It does not appear that they have any clinical training in autism or any kind of therapies that I could find. Pom...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - October 9, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: autism Source Type: blogs

Why OT Rex is an appropriate mascot for the OT Profession
This picture, and some similar to it, were widely passed around social media within the last year as an expression of the occupational therapy profession.  The picture is a play on the humorous limitations of T-Rex, and how adaptive equipment presumably supplied by an OT could help him with his 'reach.'There have been discussions on social media sites about the divide between academia and clinical practice.  This is not a new debate but it has become more important as the profession discusses a possible switch to a doctoral degree for entry level practice.One primary criticism is that that AOTA Ad Hoc group that ...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - October 8, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education OT practice Source Type: blogs

When your legacy is OT education and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
I support free market capitalism, and respect ownership rights people have in the money they have earned through voluntary trade.  Since the money belongs to them they should be able to spend it or give it away at their own discretion.This week we all learned that the University of Southern California Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy received a $20 million gift from the Chan family.  The gift creates the first named and endowed occupational therapy program in the nation, according to the school's website.The article states that USC is a pioneer in occupational science and occupational the...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - September 23, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education Source Type: blogs

Basic vs. applied science: The ongoing OT and OS debate
 Over the course of the last several years an important professional debate about social justice has been occurring in the occupational therapy profession.That actual debate started innocently by a student who posted a question in the Public Forums on OT Connections who was interested in conversation about an RA motion to remove Social Justice from the AOTA Code of Ethics.  That student disagreed, stating that she did not think that Social Justice represented a single political philosophy and that it should not be removed.Some leaders in the occupational therapy community voiced their support of the student's pos...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - September 9, 2014 Category: Occupational Health Tags: OT Education OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs

Patient vs. Client - What could go wrong? Look around and see...
Thirty years ago there was an important philosophical debate in the occupational therapy profession.  That debate had to do with whether or not use of the term 'patient' or 'client' was more appropriate for occupational therapy.Reilly argued that a move away from the term 'patient' would equate to abandoning the moral base of the profession and in fact changes the entire purpose of the profession.  She considered the change as abandonment of our ethics around patient care, and without those ethics we would no longer be in a position to help people because we would instead have to focus on contractually serving th...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - August 30, 2014 Category: Occupational Therapists Tags: OT Education OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs

Comments re: recent RCT on sensory integration
I received several emails asking me about the dialogue that was recently published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders regarding the Schaaf, et. al (2013) study.  A kind colleague forwarded the comments to me and I had the chance to review them.Ashburner, Rodger, Ziviani, and Hinder (2014) made some comments about the original research.  They basically outlined concerns with the parent report measures, lack of blinding, and confounding impact of invested time for the parents.  They also expressed concerns with dosage and non-equivalent treatment conditions between groups.  The original ...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - August 5, 2014 Category: Occupational Therapists Tags: evidence-based practice sensory integration Source Type: blogs

Do we need more schooling, or just re-tooling?
In a conversation on the OT Connections Forum Dr. Pam Toto stated "These other professions - PT, Pharmacy, Nursing - whether you think they are comparable or not, have evolved to a point where they feel a need for that additional training for competent entry-level practice."I think these comments are interesting.  Dr. Toto is not the first to make these kinds of observations.  Others have stated that we need to prepare practitioners for the complexity and demands of the future.'  I have been wondering what that really means.First of all, I would like to acknowledge that in some instances our practice tools...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - July 31, 2014 Category: Occupational Therapists Tags: history OT Education OT practice philosophy Source Type: blogs

Witness
I sat on the witness stand, about 20 feet away from the parents that I had known and worked with for the last five years, and did my best to answer the Judge's questions as accurately as possible.  I think that I was more uncomfortable than the parents were and they did not seem to have any ill will and did not seem to be upset about my testimony.  They knew that I was just telling the truth, I think.I told the Family Court Judge that I knew the family for several years because several of their children had been assigned to me for early intervention occupational therapy.  I was asked about one of my therapy ...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - July 9, 2014 Category: Occupational Therapists Tags: Disability rights OT practice school-based practice Source Type: blogs

Crisis of confidence in AOTA governance
A crisis of confidence is defined as a situation in which people have stopped believing that something is good.  Such a point has been reached with the American Occupational Therapy Association's Representative Assembly.Here is some data for those interested in understanding our current Representative Assembly and the meeting that is happening that is precipitating a crisis of confidence. FIRST OF ALL, it is clear that there are many dedicated people who are attending the meeting, voting, and representing you as is their responsibility.  It takes time, energy, and commitment to volunteer. However, here are some...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - June 19, 2014 Category: Occupational Therapists Source Type: blogs

Emmanuelism provided the Core Values to the developing occupational therapy profession
As part of a multi-year research effort into the nature of Social Justice I have been participating in an lengthy conversation about this topic on the OT Connections forum, which is an official message board for the American Occupational Therapy Association.From the beginning of the discussion some have claimed that Social Justice is a Core Value in occupational therapy.  This has been a difficult claim to validate, because there does not seem to be a a standard definition of 'Core Value' just as there does not seem to be agreement on the definition of Social Justice itself."In 2003, members of the AOTA Representative...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - May 7, 2014 Category: Occupational Therapists Tags: history Source Type: blogs

Academia knows best: Mandating doctoral education for entry level occupational therapy practice.
The American Occupational Therapy Association Board of Directors has issued a position statement that future occupational therapists will need to be doctorally prepared for entry-level practice by 2025.  They have arrived at this recommendation after undergoing an insular process that neglected to engage broad stakeholder participation.I understand that this is a weighty charge, so I will outline the evidence as clearly as possible.The AOTA Board informed their decision on two workgroups: one an Ad Hoc Board Committee on the Future of OT Education chaired by Dr. Thomas Fisher and the other an internal subcommittee of...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - May 3, 2014 Category: Occupational Therapists Tags: OT Education OT practice Source Type: blogs