Achieving AOTA’s Centennial Vision:The Role of the Educators–Viewpoint

David A. Haynes, MBA, OTR/L

ABSTRACT. Utilizing the latest technology, improving our communi-cation skills, celebrating diversity wherever we encounter it, and in-creasing our political activism are the keys to success for OT’s next 100years. doi:10.1300/J003v21n01_27 [Article copies available for a fee from TheHaworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>

2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Technology, education, activism

A wise man once said, “I have looked into the future, and the future isnow.” As we look ahead to the centennial celebration of AOTA we mustrealize that our future is in our present. As educators we must acknowl-edge the fact that the students sitting in the classrooms today will be-come the leaders of our profession in the future. The knowledge andexperiences they garner in their quest for education in the present mustprepare them for the many uncertainties they will face in the future.

COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY

The future of Occupational Therapy looks promising. It holds thepromise of job security as the largest segment of our nation’s population

David A. Haynes is Chair, OT Assistant Program Directors Educational Council,and Director, OT Assistant Program, Jefferson College of Health Sciences, 920 SouthJefferson Street, Roanoke, VA 24016 (E-mail: dhaynes@jchs.edu).

Occupational Therapy in Health Care, Vol. 21(1/2) 2007Available online at http://othc.haworthpress.com

© 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1300/J003v21n01_27 285

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ages and in doing so wishes to remain active and continue to lead mean-ingful lives. One of the greatest challenges in the future of our profes-sion will be to utilize the enormous amount of technology available tous. Students today are already more “techno-savvy” than the majority oftheir educators; however, they must learn how to put their knowledgeinto something more practical and easy to understand by the older gen-eration that seeks to benefit from its use.

The use of technology will be one of the biggest factors in our futurepractice. Already we have seen the world become much smaller due tothe invention of the Internet. Big and bulky computers, once understoodonly by a few, have been honed into small portable hand-held devicesused by many. Common everyday events to our ancestors, such as writ-ing a letter, are giving way to e-mail messages on the laptop computer ortext messaging by phone. Businesses that once were small, local estab-lishments have been able, through the use of this technology, to becomeplayers on the global stage without moving from their original location.Medicine has benefited greatly from this new technology as well. Pro-cedures that once required long hospitalizations and an extended periodto recover have become outpatient procedures with little or no recoveryperiod. People are living longer and better lives than in any other periodin world history. This is our biggest challenge in the future. How do weharness all the technology at our disposal to enable our clients, both ableand disabled, to live their lives to the fullest? Technology in the rehabil-itation setting alone has ballooned exponentially in the last ten years. Inanother ten years we may see robots and/or other mechanical inventionsassisting the severely handicapped. Technology textbooks are outdatedas soon as they are printed. It is impossible for the colleges and universi-ties to stay abreast of all the technological advances every year. Practi-tioners themselves will need to accept this challenge as part of theirlife-long learning in an effort to remain current with advances being in-troduced almost on a daily basis. Indeed, OTs and OTAs may well be inthe forefront introducing some of these technological advances.

A major issue to be addressed will be access to this needed technol-ogy. Access now is hampered by the cost factor. The cost of technology,as well as health care itself, is limited by people’s ability to pay for theservices needed. Part of our role as providers of a much-needed serviceis to work toward making our services available to all those who couldbenefit from them. Toward this effort, our profession must continue tolobby and market to third-party payers and political policy makers thebenefits of our services as well as their cost effectiveness.

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Communication will remain the key to success. Students of the futuremust be able to express themselves in such a way that the clients theyserve can understand the concepts they are proposing. Becoming awareof diversities in people’s culture as well as speaking in different lan-guages will be second nature. School programs will need to placegreater emphasis on the students’ abilities to translate and communicatein different dialects in order to serve the varied populations where theymay work. Not too far into the future Caucasians may no longer be themost dominant here in the United States which may cause quite achange in the daily lives of us all.

OTA FIELDWORK EDUCATION

Education needs to become broader in scope and yet somehow man-age to keep its focus on the individual. Fieldwork requirements willneed to be extended to allow for more hands-on application of new con-cepts being taught in the classroom. Expansion of fieldworks will alsobe needed to allow exploration of different settings outside the custom-ary medical model. OTAs particularly will need more experiences insettings where they will be expected to function almost independently–receiving only minimal supervision from the OT. In an effort to reachmore clients in the shortest amount of time, the Assistants on-site willbe utilized more in the evaluation process. Many OTAs already developmost of the essential intake information for the OT who then establishesthe treatment protocol. OTAs must be able to assess the needs of theirclients and recommend needed changes in a timely manner to thosetreatment plans.

OTAS AS LEADERS

Facing the future, OTAs must learn to take on more leadership roles–both on the job and in the professional arena. It is no longer acceptableto think of the OTA as just subservient to the OT. They should be ad-dressed as a team–two people working closely together in order toachieve the stated goals. Both are professionals, both having expertisein using occupations for a therapeutic purpose, and both advocating fortheir clients’ safety, health, and welfare. OTAs’ experiences and techni-cal skills should be recognized by their supervising OT as a powerful re-source to them in their treatment planning and implementation. OTAs

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must be given the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and expertise.Specialty certifications should be extended to them as well as the OT.Once achieved, third-party payers and employers need to acknowledgetheir higher level of expertise and greater benefits being received by theclients they treat.

POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND RESEARCH

Educational programs will need to impress upon the next generationof practitioners the fact that they need to become politically active.Membership in their National, as well as State organizations, must beaccepted as a professional responsibility. Courses in how to negotiatepolitical issues need to be added to the curriculum. As our practices be-come more and more community based, practitioners (OT and OTA)need to learn how to turn grassroots efforts into money-generating pro-posals that will fund special projects for the improvement of the com-munities that we serve.

OTAs need to become more research oriented. Not to the same levelas the OTs but enough to design and collect needed data reflecting thepositive outcomes of the treatments they provide. OTAs should be theprime informants for the OTs in their research topics and in collectingtheir data. This much-needed data will be used to illustrate to other ther-apeutic disciplines, politicians, and third-party payers just how cost ef-fective using occupational therapy is and has always been. OTAs mayuse the same information on the local level to explain the need to expandtheir services or add programs to those already being offered.

After a period of about five years, OTA programs are finally begin-ning to see a rise in the number of applicants to our programs. Unfortu-nately, many programs did not survive the lean years and were closed.This means the ones that have survived are being called upon to producemore assistants thus stretching the resources needed in their education.Fieldwork sites now are and will become even more critical in the fu-ture. The ability of practicing therapists to supervise students mustbe seen as a high priority in order to produce the best practitioners.Students do take time and they may not always do things correctly thefirst time; however, we were all students at one point in our careers andwe should remember the kindnesses shown us when we first attemptedto practice. Fieldwork is expanding into many different areas and somestudents on their Level II fieldworks are even functioning with limitedsupervision. This is a great way to expand the field of OT especially into

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those areas where we are not as well represented now as we would liketo be. It also provides us with avenues throughout our communities tobecome more visible as a college and as a medical service provider.However, we do still need to stress the necessity for practitioners to takeon students to supervise when asked. We expect graduates to becomeindependent eventually, but they also need to recognize those areas ofpractice in which they still need more experience. This is true for themore “seasoned” practitioner as well.

The future is a mystery for all of us. However, as OT practitioners weare poised to make our next 100 years even better than our first. Tech-nology, communication, diversity, and political activism are the keys.Are you ready for the challenge?

doi:10.1300/J003v21n01_27

Forum: Achieving AOTA'S 2017 Centennial Vision 289

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