Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this blog are entirely our own and not necessarily those of our employer or any other occupational therapist.

Wednesday 4 February 2009

what do undergraduates need to know?


Here at Salford we are constantly reviewing our programme to ensure that we are enabling the students to gain the necessary skills that they will need in order to be more than capable clinicians and hopefully to further develop the profession in the future. We have thoughts and ideas about what's currently working and not working for us but I'd be interested to know what others think about what skills you think a band 5 'should' have. We are told fairly regularly by a small (I think) number of clinicians that our students don't have enough knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Is this important? Do we need this knowledge as OTs? I would also be interested to see what others think about theoretical frameworks that we teach students. They seem to be getting and understanding generic models (MOHO, CMOP, Kawa River) but getting confused about what we called intervention models (CBT, Neurodevelopmental, Psychodynamic, Biomechanical etc.) We're wondering whether this is because we're not teaching it in quite the right way and find that students talk about referring on to others regularly and don't seem to be able to articulate what they're doing as on OT....we want more on therapeutic activity rather than using a CBT approach for example. All thoughts and ideas greatfully recieved.