An Exploration of Experiences that Influence Occupational Therapy Students\u27 Motivations to Pursue Occupational Therapy as a Career

Occupational therapy (OT) is a client-centered healthcare profession that uses therapeutic activities to increase an individual’s, group’s, or population\u27s participation in meaningful activities, otherwise known as occupations. The general underlying factors that motivate one’s decision to choose this career path is well established within the existing literature. However, research into the experiences of students working alongside an occupational therapist (OT) prior currently faces a significant gap. The aim of this study is to identify and understand what first-hand experiences of OT brought OT students to pursue a career in occupational therapy. Through the lens of narrative inquiry, participants were given a narrative prompt to describe their first-hand experiences with occupational therapy. Following the participants’ completion of a narrative prompt, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four pre-OT students from Dominican University of California and one entry level doctorate student from University of St. Augustine, Miami. Wilcock’s (1999) Doing, Being and Becoming was referenced as a guided theory during the thematic analysis as it reflects on “how a dynamic balance between doing and being is central to healthy living and how becoming whatever a person is best fitted to become is dependent on both” (1999, p.2). Through the utilization of these themes, the findings reveal that initial OT observation hours are highly influential towards one’s decision to pursue OT as a career. Additionally, these findings suggest a need for required hours to include reflection and adequate hands-on experiences as provided by OT departments within colleges and universities

Exploring Experiences that Influence Occupational Therapy as a Career

There is an abundance of students choosing to pursue a career in the healthcare field, however, compared to other healthcare professions, such as nursing and physical therapy, occupational therapy is not as favorable. The most contributing factor to an individual\u27s reluctance to choose occupational therapy is the lack of knowledge of occupational therapy’s scope of practice. If that is the case, in which people are not choosing occupational therapy as a profession, what is it to say about those who are choosing occupational therapy? The purpose of this study is to further understand how first-hand experiences of occupational therapy have influenced students’ desire to pursue a career in occupational therapy. The efforts of this study hope to expand individuals’ understanding of occupational therapy and what it has to offer as a potential career choice. The nature of this study also allows participants to reflect on their own journey to occupational therapy and how it has affected themselves

WoundView: A Prototype Telemedicine System Designed for Wound Assessment

The current standard of wound assessment is heavily dependent on manual measurements and visual inspection. This approach has areas that need to be improved to provide a better quality service to patients and to enhance the accuracy of the assessment. Some of existing steps can be digitally automated and the image data can be properly stored for later computation and analysis. These steps will reduce inconvenience for the patient and increase accuracy for wound care. This project is a creation of a prototype system that allows a team of medical practitioners to remotely record data of a patient’s wounds and then assess the healing process of the patient’s wounds with the assistance of computers and domain experts at a medical office. The system is developed as a web application, connected with a back-end sub-system including a database. By using a front-end graphical user interface, such as through the Internet or on a mobile phone, a local medical practitioner can capture the images of wounds at a patient’s location and request an evaluation by physicians who are located at their medical office. The physician remotely assesses the transmitted images and is able to give feedback or a diagnosis in real time. This assessment procedure provides a convenience to patients who are experiencing lack of mobility. This also enables the patients to receive high quality services from medical professionals at other facilities. In addition, the developed system improves the quality of service by utilizing a computer-assisted measuring process on the digitized images. This developed system will also allow color/shape tracking of the image in order to automatically measure the wound’s dimensions. Lastly, the data can be digitally archived and has the ability to be used for historical comparison to keep track of the wound’s healing progress with annotations attached to the image. The Senior Capstone team’s role in this project is the initialization of the WoundView system and the aforementioned tasks. Our sponsor institution is Parkview’s Mirro Center for Research and Innovation. This project has future potential to contribute greatly to the under-developed branch of telemedicine due its ability to be improved and expanded on. One such example includes deriving the wound depth and volume from the images. Another could include image morphing the progress of the healing wound through 3D modeling.http://opus.ipfw.edu/stu_symp2016/1004/thumbnail.jp

Marin County Civic Center & Fair Grounds

This project presents the Marin County Civic Center & Fairgrounds audio interviews, and eMagazine, and video and writing on the the Marin County Civic Center, Fairgrounds, Annual Fair, and County Jail.https://scholar.dominican.edu/public-history-websites/1002/thumbnail.jp