The demise of the profession?

A student was telling me an all too familiar story yesterday about some training that she had attended whilst on placement that was called something like 'neuro-cognitive therapy'. The course was run by a psychologist who was introducing the multi-disciplinary team a 'new' way of working with individuals with psychosis based on the evidence that many people with psychosis have temporal and frontal lobe abnormalities. The 'new' way of working was to therefore help the individual to adapt their environment so that there was less stimulation, especially when they wanted to improve their concentration for a specific task. The training also looked at ways that tasks could be broken down, cues could be used to aid processing issues and so on. The student reported that the OTs that were present put it to the psychologist that what she was talking about was simply 'OT' to which she agreed. SO WHY AREN'T OTs DOING THIS TRAINING why are the psychologists doing this. As I listened to the student's story I found myself becoming increasingly angry as not only did it reflect a story that an OT had told me the week previously but it also reflected my own experiences within the clinical field.





So what is happening? Does this happen around the world or just in Britain? It seems to me that OT as a profession has always lacked the status or profile of other health care professionals (who ever knows what an OT does!) but what are we doing about other professionals taking the work that we have done since day one, putting a new spin on it, making it the new 'sexy' thing to be doing and gaining the credit for it.





OTs should be doing this work, we should be having the credit, so why aren't we??