National Survey to Identify Mental Health Topics in Entry-level OT and OTA Curricula: Implications for Occupational Therapy Education

Mental health has been identified as a priority practice area for occupational therapy. However, recent research suggests that the number of occupational therapy practitioners working in mental health is declining. The purpose of this survey research study was to examine the extent to which occupational therapy (OT) and occupational therapy assistant (OTA) programs include mental health topics in their curricula. A link to an on-line survey was sent to program directors of OT and OTA programs in the United States. A total of 105 programs fully completed the survey (33% response rate). All of the respondents (n=105) reported that their curricula included content related to adult mental health conditions and interventions and 98.1% (n=103) included content related to 11 child and adolescent mental health conditions. Programs varied in how explicitly they focused on specific intervention strategies to support or improve mental health. Focused pre-service curricular content and intentional fieldwork experiences may help to ensure that OT practitioners are inducted into mental health settings and equipped to meet practice demands. Entry-level OT and OTA programs cover a broad range of mental health-related topics. More research is needed to understand why some topics are included in curricula at greater rates than others

Perceptions of Occupational Therapy Involvement in School Mental Health: A Pilot Study

Background: Mental health providers outside of occupational therapy, including those who work in school systems practice, often do not fully understand the contribution that occupational therapy practitioners can make to the delivery of mental health services. Method: The purpose of this mixed methods pilot study is to describe how instructional support staff from one special education cooperative learned about occupational therapy’s role in school mental health and to explain how this education changed the instructional support staff members’ perceptions regarding the involvement of occupational therapy practitioners in school-based mental health services. Results: Instructional support staff\u27s perceptions about occupational therapy changed as a result of the training. Discussion: Occupational therapy practitioners can be viewed as valuable members of the school mental health team if other practitioners are educated about their scope of practice

The Use of an Online Module to Increase Occupational Therapy Practitioners’ Evidence-based Practice Knowledge and Skills

Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness of an optional, self-paced, online module to increase occupational therapy practitioners’ knowledge and skills related to evidence-based practice (EBP). Method: Participants’ EBP knowledge and skills were evaluated using the Adapted Fresno Test (AFT) after they completed the online module. Results: Twenty-nine occupational therapy practitioners (25 OTR/L, 4 COTA/L) completed the entire 17-month initiative. Nineteen practitioners (65.5%) used the supplemental online module and 10 (34.5%) did not. Analyses of AFT scores revealed a mean test score of 83.00 (n = 19, SD + 31.11) for participants who utilized the online EBP module and a mean test score of 56.20 (n = 10, SD + 36.67) for participants who did not use the module. An independent sample t test (equal variances assumed) revealed that participants who used the online module achieved statistically significantly higher scores ( p = 0.048, \u3c 0.05) on the AFT. Discussion: The findings from this study suggest that the online EBP module was a useful support in significantly improving occupational therapy practitioners’ knowledge and skills related to evidence-based practice. Conclusions: Online modules may be an effective tool to teach practitioners about EBP. More research is needed to identify particular features of online learning modules that are the most effective in increasing practitioners’’ EBP knowledge and skills

Instructional Strategies Used to Improve Students’ Comfort and Skill in Addressing the Occupational Therapy Process

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of an intentional blending of instructional strategies in an occupational therapy (OT) entry-level master’s course. The OT Adult Practice course uses case-based instructional strategies, clinical skills labs, and standardized patient experiences in a dovetailed approach across three progressively complex clinical scenarios involving adult clients. The course is designed to support students in addressing the entire OT Process. Results of quantitative data analysis indicated that the sequential application of case-based instructional strategies, lab experiences, and standardized patient learning opportunities significantly improved students’ self-perception of their level of comfort and skill in being able to perform the following components of the OT process for adult clients: occupational profile, OT evaluation, developing an OT treatment plan, implementing OT treatment, and planning for discharge

Shotgun metagenome data of a defined mock community using Oxford Nanopore, PacBio and Illumina technologies.

Metagenomic sequence data from defined mock communities is crucial for the assessment of sequencing platform performance and downstream analyses, including assembly, binning and taxonomic assignment. We report a comparison of shotgun metagenome sequencing and assembly metrics of a defined microbial mock community using the Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) MinION, PacBio and Illumina sequencing platforms. Our synthetic microbial community BMock12 consists of 12 bacterial strains with genome sizes spanning 3.2-7.2 Mbp, 40-73% GC content, and 1.5-7.3% repeats. Size selection of both PacBio and ONT sequencing libraries prior to sequencing was essential to yield comparable relative abundances of organisms among all sequencing technologies. While the Illumina-based metagenome assembly yielded good coverage with few misassemblies, contiguity was greatly improved by both, Illumina + ONT and Illumina + PacBio hybrid assemblies but increased misassemblies, most notably in genomes with high sequence similarity to each other. Our resulting datasets allow evaluation and benchmarking of bioinformatics software on Illumina, PacBio and ONT platforms in parallel

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

A Qualitative Study on Occupational Therapy Students’ Perceptions of Using Keyform Maps

A keyform map is an innovative tool, derived from Rasch analyzed measures, that reveals the relationship of a client to the item challenges on an assessment to reflect more clearly what the client can and cannot do. These maps offer increased ease and efficiency when using standardized evaluation measures. Keyform map use has been studied in clinical occupational therapy practice. Their use in occupational therapy education, however, has not been studied which creates a potential gap with the untapped student stakeholder. This qualitative study examined the impacts of using keyform maps in an online course with occupational therapy students during the evaluation and intervention planning process for different client case vignettes. A constant comparative analysis revealed that students perceived keyform maps show them two themes more clearly: (1) the just right challenge that is difficult but not impossible and (2) a task hierarchy that helps efficiently prioritize and justify choices specific to the client and decisions personalized to the client. By introducing pre-service learners to keyform maps, OT educators can take a huge step forward in meeting the profession’s charge to increase efforts towards personalized measurement

Shotgun metagenome data of a defined mock community using Oxford Nanopore, PacBio and Illumina technologies.

Metagenomic sequence data from defined mock communities is crucial for the assessment of sequencing platform performance and downstream analyses, including assembly, binning and taxonomic assignment. We report a comparison of shotgun metagenome sequencing and assembly metrics of a defined microbial mock community using the Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) MinION, PacBio and Illumina sequencing platforms. Our synthetic microbial community BMock12 consists of 12 bacterial strains with genome sizes spanning 3.2-7.2 Mbp, 40-73% GC content, and 1.5-7.3% repeats. Size selection of both PacBio and ONT sequencing libraries prior to sequencing was essential to yield comparable relative abundances of organisms among all sequencing technologies. While the Illumina-based metagenome assembly yielded good coverage with few misassemblies, contiguity was greatly improved by both, Illumina + ONT and Illumina + PacBio hybrid assemblies but increased misassemblies, most notably in genomes with high sequence similarity to each other. Our resulting datasets allow evaluation and benchmarking of bioinformatics software on Illumina, PacBio and ONT platforms in parallel