Musings of an unconventional OT student

How do we as OTs help make our clients' dreams come true? Or to make the statement more scientific....How do we as OTs take our clients and their goals into account? As part of our course we learn all about client centered assessment and intervention. This basically means that we use our clients and their challenges and goals as a way to guide our assessment and intervention. Sometimes this can be rather difficult as goals can be unrealistic or not match with your therapeutic goals. How do we solve this problem? Well we can educate if goals are unrealistic and we can incorporate client goals into our intervention plan. How do we do his? As OTs, we are taught all about activity analysis, and by analyzing an activity, you are aware of all the components that make up an activity. If you're aware of all the components, you can change certain aspects to be able to get what you want out of a session while still fulfilling the clients' wishes. I used this approach when treati...

...Or in my case, a thousand hours of fieldwork begins with a single day of fieldwork. And every day of fieldwork, is an opportunity to learn new things. Today I attempted to do my first treatment session... and had varying degrees of success throughout the session. My first session was bed mobility and I used my observations from Monday's session to come up with the treatment plan. As every person's day begins with getting out of bed, it made the most sense to work on helping the client be able to do this (basic client information, observations and assessment findings in previous post.) For my client (spinal cord injury), it was quite a successful session as he learnt new techniques to be able to sit up in bed so that he can be functional, even with his lack of lower limb function. This involved transferring from supine to long sitting and then transferring from long sitting to short sitting (sitting on the edge of the bed - SOEB.) The session was taken a step further ...

So on Monday I had my first experience as a third year OT student on acute physical block. What does all this entail? Interview, assessment and - newly introduced in third year - intervention, all in the space of a couple of hours. Pressure? Not at all. This was not the case with my client as he has a 10 week rehab period so I will be seeing him for my entire block. While there are some advantages, such as not having to write a case study at lastminute.com, and not having to print assessment forms a thousand times, it's something I have experienced in the previous year in both psych and physical blocks and was hoping for some new experiences and new diagnoses. I was rather dejected at having learnt that the turnover rate is not as high as I expected, but as my mother always says, make the best of every opportunity and you will make a difference in someones life (even if that life is your own.) And that's exactly what OT is about. Making a difference in your clients' liv...