Nan with the Plan

My senior year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama I started a job as a therapy aide at a local outpatient clinic.  I loved the atmosphere and the fast pace as it was a very busy clinic with often times 10 patients an hour between 3 therapists and 2 PTAs.  Often times every client's session started with preparatory exercises such as the arm/leg bike, pulleys, fluidotherapy machines, and more.  As I was working there I saw the purpose to these exercises to warm up the muscles before therapy sessions.  Now that I have spent three months in OT school, I see there might be better activities to engage the clients in and make their hour sessions more worthwhile and motivating.  I wonder if the therapists used these preparatory exercises because they were so busy and could not work the entirety of the hour one-on-one with the clients, forcing them split their time between themselves and prep exercises. I thought the busier the clinic was the better ...

I listened to the Glass Half Full podcast about the role of OT in an Au-Some Swimmers program, a program providing swimming lessons to kids on the autism spectrum.  A group of OT students approached the Au-Some Swimmers program as a community service learning project.  Before I started the podcast I had no idea what to expect or how these students were going to incorporate OT into the swimming lessons. I really liked the way they approached their project because when asked what the objectives were they said they didn't really have any to start out with.  They interviewed the stakeholders of the program to find out what they were having difficulties with and developed the objectives from there.  This reminded me of the process of the occupational profiles we have been doing in class.  The OT students quickly learned the volunteer lifeguards were having trouble communicating with each other and the kids.  That is when I instantly saw the value of OT in this p...