Blogs

 Working in a healthcare facility as an Occupational Therapy practitioner one meets a variety of personalities.  One may see the person that walks with coffee in hand, another who keeps to themselves when working with a client, or the social butterfly.  And there may be the occasional person who becomes frustrated easily toward others!  Whatever the case, everyone has the same end game; helping a client reach their goals. 

Take a step back and look at how you perform best as an OT practitioner.  Do you prefer a clean desk?  Do you need an organized clipboard to reference manual muscle tests and nerve innervations?  Do you eyeball or measure range of motion? 

Perhaps the new OT/OTA graduate appears the most eager, brings in the newest textbooks to reference, and asks the most questions.  But, everyone falls into a groove of how they work best. 

See how you measure up!  Take the OTality quiz and find out if you are a Type A or B OTality.

OTality Quiz 

Answer Key 

The holiday season brings great joy and a giving spirit within each of us.  As you are wrapping your gifts, preparing for a jovial visit with family and friends, and hanging your decorations to adorn your home, remember to bring good tidings to your clients who cannot be home this holiday season. 

Many Occupational Therapy practitioners work in an inpatient department.  Whether it is long-term care, acute care, pysch, or inpatient rehabilitation your clients are in need of having a form of normalcy to their day. 

Using your creativity is essential, as you have Occupational Therapy clients with various functional and behavioral capacities.  Asking your OT clients to tell you what they like to do during the holidays will help you design interventions in your plight to decrease the situational emotions they may ensue.  Likewise, bringing to life what brings you joy during the holidays may bring joy to others. 

For fun, you can use this assessment to incorporate into your Occupational Therapy intervention for the holidays.  Please click below:

Utilizing restraints is not an ideal alternative for use in healthcare facilities.  On many occaisions, an Occupational Therapist may receive a referral for wheelchair positioning or to address another impairment, as a means to decrease the use of a restraint.  Here is a good article that was written about how healthcare facilities can decrease the use of a restraint by staff and family education, attending to the client's needs in a timely manner, and education on what is considered a restraint. 

Providing Restraint-Free Care

Please refer to your state and healthcare facilities mandates to gain knowledge of what is considered a restraint. 

OT-ADVANTAGE.COM related articles:

Is a Geri Chair a Restraint?

Social networking and social networking come face to face.  The OT-ADVANTAGE.COM Site is now a group on Facebook.  Stay up to date on news, added resources, blogs, and other important info that can only be found on the OT-ADVANTAGE.COM Site. 

The purpose of the group is to create an additional outlet for you to receive information that happens on this site and to help you stay involved in a great Occupational Therapy community!

It always happens.  You stow away your files of continuing education certificates, sometimes lose them, and then you frantically try to add up your PDUs once your NBCOT registration is due for renewal.  The big answer YOU, the OT practitioner, wants to know is if you have enough units for your NBCOT registration renewal!  And hopefully the answer is yes. 

If you want to quell that last minute worry, that NBCOT is well aware of, they have the answer.  They now have an online personalized tracking system.  You can log in your PDUs and it will calculate them for your renewal period. 

Visit NBCOT:

Professional Development Log Portal 

The best resource for obtaining information for the OTR and OTA NBCOT exam is www.nbcot.org.  However, sometimes you may forget to visit their site for updates.  If you are anxious about your upcoming exam, it would be helpful to visit the NBCOT site.  Here are a few helpful links to answer your questions about the changes for 2009, scoring, and explanations of the test format.

Please Click:

OTA Test Format *Once on the site, visit OTA Presentation

OTR Test Format *Once on the site, visit OTR Presentation