Re: Wendy's comments: I hate to say it, but I fear option 2 is a likely scenario indeed. I have been in OT 10 years, practiced in a variety of areas including mental health and the entire continuum of rehabilitation, and worked mostly in the medical model. I have had both fabulous and not so fabulous relationships with PT's, but each and every time the responsibility was MINE to educate them about OT. Unfortuantely, I was often undermined by my own colleagues. In one setting I worked in, there was a distinct culture clash within our very large OT department..one half of the department was made up of OT's who were very reductionistic, PT wannabees; who resisted addressing self cares, psychosocial aspects of physical function; who BRISTLED when we did an inservice on client centered treatment. They tended to gravitate toward acute care, hand therapy and outpatient. The other half of the department was more occupation centered; tended to be the rehab, home health, psych and peds therapists. The department was so split that at lunch you would see all "UE PT's" sitting with the PT staff, segregated from the rest of the department. Attempts to unite us were met with a lot of resistance. The occupation based group was viewed as "less competent" becasue we were not all NDT certified, or going to shoulder conferences, etc. When one of us had to cover acute care or outpatient, it was difficult to work with some of the PT's. They wanted us to think and act like them, as the regular "OT" they worked with did.
Anyway, my point is this: I agree totally that we need to start within the ranks and get the current practitioners on board and in line with the philosophical roots of the profession. The good news is that the new ACOTE standards will go a LONG way toward turning out practitioners who are seeing things thru a different lens than those of us whe graduated 10 years ago. These are the students who are starting to graduate now, and we need to support them during fieldwork and nurture them along. I urge anyone who cares about this profession to committ to taking a student and being the one to help them learn to practice occupation based OT. They are not always seeing it in their field work settings, although we are trying like crazy to search out and use settings where a more wholistic, occupation based approach is encouraged. Keep up the good work everybody! *********��*********** Unsubscribe? Send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message's *body*, put the following text: unsubscribe OTlist ** List messages are archived at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] *********��***********
