Blog Post Challenge 6 Professional Development and Ethics!

I would consider professional development and ethics two of the most important aspects of being an OT. When I envision myself as an OT one day, I don’t see myself doing to a 9-5 job every day without any change or growth in my career, I would consider that insanity, and not a life that I would find very enjoyable. I want to grow every day, and wake up every day with new goals and desires in my field of practice. I want to bring PASSION to work every day, I don’t want to just be good, I want to be GREAT! (I would also like to mention that I look forward to reading the book “Good To Great”). So how do you keep yourself from being complacent and not having growth? Well I believe everyone have ways they keep themselves motivated, rather it be through reading motivational books, listening to inspiring podcasts, or just constantly having positive self-talk. We could all use a little boost when it comes to staying motivated in any aspect of life, especially work. Luckily as OT’s we constantly are given opportunities to grow our professional development and in a way, are required to be “lifelong learners”.  This is great for our field because it keeps our minds innovated and our passion for knowledge satisfied. We will never all be true experts in the field, but if we come to work every day with a learners’ mindset, we will truly be some the best professionals around!

I wanted to quickly mention the important of ethics and how we should view it as OT’s. It’s important to understand that our code of ethics should be thought of as a guide rather than a concrete answer to every possible dilemma we may encounter on and OFF the job. I believe deep in your heart you know if something is right or wrong, but if you’re ever uncertain, just do the right thing ;)

Blog Post Challenge #5 Assistive Technology (Dream Enabler)

Although our joint session with the speech therapist was a part of our neurological aspect class, I'd still like to blog about my experience during that session. First off I was able to see a former co-worker of mine from Firebird's restaurant. It was great to see her chasing her dream of being a speech therapist, and I always have much love for the University of Memphis, since I graduated from there in 2009, Go Tigers Go! I equally enjoyed both lectures and received well rounded information about assistive technology. I found myself very inspired about the young man taking college level courses for designing programs, while also writing a book. Without assistive technology this young man might not have been enabled to pursue his dreams. I'm excited that young men and women living with disabilities are now able to express themselves in a creative way, it's truly a beautiful thing. We have opened new worlds with endless possibilities for all people to enjoy. I think this is great from an OT perspective, because it gives people living with disabilities another aspect of meaning and value to their lives, and as OT's we love helping people enjoy the activities they find value in. I look forward to incorporating assistive technology as a practitioner. It's exciting how much assistive technology has already improved the lives of others, but image 10-20 years down the road, the innovation is going to be amazing. I also look forward to continuing my education in assistive technology, and to the many improvements it's going to bring to all people. To the young man writing the book, I'm thankful you get to chase the dreams that God has placed inside of you!

Blog Post challenge #4

Today in foundations we continued to discuss the OT process and moved into clinical observation and documentation. As students we shouldn't expect to be exceptional at observation and documentation at this point, but we should continue to grow in both areas as we move into field work and more clinical aspects in school. When observing clients we should view ourselves as the problem solvers. We look for issues that act as barriers to our clients. These barriers keep clients from achieving the occupations they not only desire to do, but also the occupations that are required for daily living. As an OT it's very important to know what to look for in clients and which assessment tools are necessary, and then to apply the correct intervention to the client in relation to whatever is hindering the patient. The best part of this clinical observation is that it's all client centered and occupation based. This is awesome because it makes our job consistent and important in an ever growing health field.

Documentation is one of the most important aspects in the field of OT. Not only is it important from a legal view, it is also the evidence that our that our methods are valid and reliable. In a way documentation can be thought of as a mini narrative to the "adventure" that we embarked upon with our clients. I appreciate the foundation and system that is incorporated into documentation, in most cases documentation will be done in some type of template. Although I'm a little nervous about diving into the documentation process, I'm also very excited about learning more about it, and constantly improving at it.

Blog post challenge #3

The occupational process was one of my favorite topics to date in OT school. I think I enjoyed it so much because before I was a rehab tech I shadowed a lot of OT's, and was able to sit in on a lot of OT evaluations. It was fun to be able to compare those experiences to what we were talking about in class. I have seen some great evaluations and I have seen some not so great evaluations. I always noticed that evaluations that did not go so great were often related to lack of trust between clients and therapist, which was often due to a bad attitude that the client was having. I was always a little surprised by how frustrated therapists would get with clients because of the clients bad attitude. The key to remember is that a bad attitude never helps another bad attitude, which goes for anything in life. The only way to overcome a bad attitude is with a great attitude! Can it be annoying at times? Yes! Is it always easy? No! In the end you and the client will both benefit from a great attitude. Often times as therapists we will come along patients who have barriers up to everyone around them (even their family), it's times like these that we should  enjoy showing the client that we truly care for them and that we're going to do everything in our power to build an awesome relationship wth them. Lastly I'm going to post a quote that always came to my mind whenever I had patients who weren't  being cooperative when I was a rehab tech, that quote is;"no act of love goes unnoticed." Meet people where they are first, the rest of therapy will then fall into place!

Blog Post Challenge #2

I enjoyed the presentation professor Flick presented to us yesterday in class and found it to be very informative. I've always been very passionate about health promotion and look forward to implementing it as a leader in the field of OT. My father is 65 and my mother is 60, they both workout 4-5 times a week with optimal nutrition for the most part, my father does love to eat potato chips, which I'm always hounding him about. I mention my parents because their healthy aging has been very influential on myself and their peers. As a rehab tech I love to reference my parents when talking to my clients, hoping to give them some positive influence and just show that it's never too late to start living a healthy lifestyle, and to be the best versions of themselves. My father still plays competitive softball and travels all throughout the south playing in tournaments, and well to put it on the nice side, he has probably had about 5 surgeries in the past 7 years, mostly knee and shoulder. I would always sit back and admire his work ethic and determination to always recover in a timely manner. His motto that he loves to use when recovering is, "when you don't use it you lose it", so as you can imagine as a tech I probably have used the phrase at least 100 times with my clients, sometimes the clients are encouraged, other times I think they could care less, but hopefully they get the point. I understand not all clients have the motivation to necessarily live a healthy lifestyle, but it's still our job as OT's to promote health constantly, and maybe be the motivation they need to improve their health for the first time in a while.

Nuro Blog 4-5-17

Reading about your father was certainly an emotional rollercoaster for me, but I am very thankful that  you shared the story with us students. First off I want to say that I admire your father's work ethic and his drive to be in excellent physical condition, he very much reminded me of my father (which made the story even more emotional for me). As most of us mentioned in class, I was in shock how awful the hospital team treated your family and how often they never directly answered the questions or concerns your family had. As an OT I hope to always be direct and intentional with clients and their families. I would also like to mention that I have always considered myself a person with much empathy and will likely always be that way due to own person struggles that I had growing up, but after watching the first video in class today I realized there are still areas of empathy that I need to work on. It's important to realize that all people have issues seen and unseen, and it should be our goal daily to just really love on people, not only as clinicians, but also just as regular people!

Blog Post Challenge 1

After studying a couple more models today in class, I find myself very interested n the "Trans-Theoritical Model of Change"and the five stages that go along with it. It's cool to compare the 5 stages and how they relate to my life when I try to do a certain diet or new workout plan. I believe having this experience with the model will help me as an OT and in some ways will give me a deeper understanding  to what my clients might struggle with early on when beginning a new intervention due to their diagnosis. I believe it's important to suggest that revision is often needed when implementing change into a clients life. Often when I begin a new diet or workout plan I might accidentally have a mess up early on and just give up on the new change/goal that I'm trying to implement, this was something I definitely struggled with in my teenage years. I have since learned that just because I have one mess up doesn't mean I should give up completely on the new goal that I am trying to achieve. Clients will have days that they feel discouraged due to personal and environmental factors, as a practitioner our job is to continue to encourage clients to not give up.  In life we all have low points and high points, I look forward to pulling as many people up as I can!