Lauren Murphy OT 425

I think it's great that AOTA already has a Code of Ethics that practitioners can refer to when faced with an ethical dilemma. It's a great guideline to refer to when in doubt. There was one ethical dilemma that the OT I shadowed faced about a year ago.  The patient that we were working in was yelling out in pain. My OT and a few PT's were trying to get the client to move out of her chair and she did not want to.  She said that she was in too much pain.  The PT's and nurses said that she was faking it and that she should just get over it. The OT that I shadowed made sure that she got an x-ray. Everyone else was not happy about that, but the OT made sure that it happened. The person ended up having a back injury that no one knew about. She choose to stand up for her patient, even though the other health care providers were trying to go against her. It's important to stand up for the right thing and not back down if it's important.

The case study that my group reviewed was about a fictional character Will Trainer, who had a spinal cord injury that resulted in quadriplegia. Will used to be very active and athletic in his previous life, so the injury had a huge impact on his mental health. After the accident, he rarely left his house, so part of the occupational therapy intervention would focus on community engagement and social interactions. It would also be important to help Will participate in outdoor adaptive activities and sports. However, in the movie, Will had very little motivation to work on these areas, so the occupational therapist would want to talk to him about possibly seeing a psychiatrist to improve his mental health.  What I took away from this case study is that an OT must understand how someone's mental health can affect motivation to participate in occupational activities. 

            I am a huge fan of TED Talks, so when I was browsing through the list of possible choices for the nuero note, I chose to watch a TED talk by neuropsychologist Kim Gorgens about concussions.   I am interested in learning more about concussions because I’m an avid sports fan and I got a concussion when I was around twelve years old during a soccer game. After that incident, I wore head gear, which was like a large padded head band that strapped around my head. Luckily my coaches made all the defenders on the team wear it, so I didn’t stand out. In the TED Talk, Gorgens talks about children sustaining concussions. She discusses how adults recover quicker from head injuries and that kids take a little longer. It’s important to be cautious and vigilant since we don’t fully understand the long-term effects that multiple head injuries can have on a child. She gives three pieces of advice for parents: study up, speak up, and suit up. Furthermore, she wants people to un

Professional development is important in any career field, and especially in occupational therapy.   It’s important to maintain professional development at all times to represent our profession in a positive light. It’s smart to keep up with all documents in two different forms just in case one or the other gets destroyed or lost.   This way, if you get audited, you will be able to get through the process quickly and effectively if all the documents are organized. I also think it’s a great idea to keep clinical pearls and quotes in a professional development portfolio. That way, it’s easy to keep up with all of the great insight and tips that a practitioner learns along the way. Professional development goes hand-in-hand with competency. We must have good professional development to be competent OT’s. Competency includes keeping up with yearly professional development units and continuing education units. Competency also includes documenting our services in a

Person-first language puts the individual first before the disability. It's so important to realize that no one is defined by their disability or illness. I think that person-first language is so great because it can also help improve a person's self-esteem. For example, which phrase would you rather hear if you had ADHD: "The ADHD kid" or "The child with ADHD."  The latter is much more respectful and acknowledges that ADHD is not the defining feature of the person. Person-first language parallels to the top-down approach that we use in occupational therapy. As OT's we look at the person before we look at the disability or illness.

Because I developed typically, I never really thought about how easy it is for me to access most things in this world.  It wasn't really until college when I had to pick a building on campus and write a paper on whether it was accessible or not did I really think about how people with disabilities may have trouble accessing the environment that I took for granted. Universal design is such a wonderful concept that I haven't really thought about before. Creating environments so that they are accessible to all people should be a uniform construction ideal. It's awesome that universal design doesn't typically cost much more than a typical design. I hope that Universal design is the direction our country is headed.

I like the fact that documentation in occupational therapy is somewhat uniform. A lot of documentation types include a simple outline using the acronym SOAP. The S in soap stands for subjective. This is the part of our notes that we put information about our client. We usually include information from our own observation and from a client-interview. The O in SOAP stands for objective. This is the section of the notes, that contains facts. The A stands for assessment and the P stands for plan. This method has been used since the 1960's and is still used today. The career of occupational therapy has changed so much over the years, so it is nice to see something that has remained the same for several decades.

In the future, I would love to work with people who have suffered from acquired brain injuries. The brain's complexity fascinates me; I'm very interested in learning more about how brain injuries and occupational therapy are tied together. There were a few things in today's lecture that were very surprising to me. I didn't realize that one-third of all injury-related deaths in the United States are related to traumatic brain injuries. It also surprised me that falls and not car accidents were the top cause of TBI's. When I was in sixth grade I was kicked in the face with a soccer ball so hard that it knocked me unconscious. I couldn't see colors for a few hours after that. My doctors gave me an eye patch to wear for a day and told me that I should be fine but shouldn't play soccer for a few days. It was the state tournament, so naturally I played the next day anyways. (I didn't play very well.) Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night feeling

There are stigmas in society surrounding people with disabilities. It was very eye-opening to see in the Ted Talk how the dictionary defines disability. Almost all of the words and synonyms had negative connotations. The definition must have been created by people who have little knowledge about people with disabilities. People with disabilities can do anything. The only time that they can't do everything that typical people can do is when they are limited by society. People with disabilities may accomplish the same task just in a more creative way.