The demise of the profession?

A student was telling me an all too familiar story yesterday about some training that she had attended whilst on placement that was called something like 'neuro-cognitive therapy'. The course was run by a psychologist who was introducing the multi-disciplinary team a 'new' way of working with individuals with psychosis based on the evidence that many people with psychosis have temporal and frontal lobe abnormalities. The 'new' way of working was to therefore help the individual to adapt their environment so that there was less stimulation, especially when they wanted to improve their concentration for a specific task. The training also looked at ways that tasks could be broken down, cues could be used to aid processing issues and so on. The student reported that the OTs that were present put it to the psychologist that what she was talking about was simply 'OT' to which she agreed. SO WHY AREN'T OTs DOING THIS TRAINING why are the psychologists doing this. As I listened to the student's story I found myself becoming increasingly angry as not only did it reflect a story that an OT had told me the week previously but it also reflected my own experiences within the clinical field.





So what is happening? Does this happen around the world or just in Britain? It seems to me that OT as a profession has always lacked the status or profile of other health care professionals (who ever knows what an OT does!) but what are we doing about other professionals taking the work that we have done since day one, putting a new spin on it, making it the new 'sexy' thing to be doing and gaining the credit for it.





OTs should be doing this work, we should be having the credit, so why aren't we??

Good news

A very brief post, but worthwhile nonetheless….
4 Staff in the department have had abstracts accepted for presentation at the COTEC Congress in Hamburg 2008, and we have also achieved Faculty outline approval of our MSc in Advanced Occupational Therapy via e-learning which if all goes to plan will begin in September 2008.
I know a lot of people have expressed interested in the programme, but until we have final approval we aren’t in a position to say too much more other than that we will be welcoming applicants from all over the world to what we believe will be an exciting and innovative MSc. Watch this space for further updates, and who knows we might see you in Hamburg!

Continually reflecting

Having read Angela's post about Holism it the merit of blogs started to become apparent to me. The session Angela did with the third level students was also of interest to me as I think that in order for the profession to survive and flourish we need to all 'think outside the box'. It is therefore important that there is ongoing discussion within the profession of how this could be done and traditionally this discussion would have taken place either through Therapy Weekly, OT news or the BJOT. But it takes time to write a piece, send it off to the relevant editor, wait for it to be reviewed, have it published etc etc. Blogging on the other hand is almost instant, have a thought, write it down, press send, what could be simpler!..........I think I'm becoming a convert!