ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog

Politically controversial conversations continue to spew from the social media accounts of AOTA leaders.  These conversations represent perspectives that are not reflective of the broad membership and are highly partisan.  The steady stream of ideological thinking is concerning because it represents a pattern where some leaders don't know how to separate their personal political inclinations from the mission of a diverse professional association. We often associate topics of diversity and nondiscrimination and inclusion in racial or ethnic or religious perspectives.  However, in what is supposed to be a politically neutral environment like a professional association, we can also consider the negative impact that is caused when leadership adopts a partisan and biased political agenda. This is not a new problem with the American Occupational Therapy Association.  The inclusion of Social Justice in the Code of Ethics was the first major foray of leaders into political partisanship

I got an interesting question in email today so I decided I would answer it publicly.  The email asked: You used to write a lot about early intervention, but there hasn't been much on that topic lately.  Providers are still struggling, there are provider shortages in some areas, lots of people lost their businesses and either went into agencies or gave up on early intervention.  Are you still working in this area and will you still be writing about how we are struggling with early intervention? Here is my answer: The reason why I don't write about early intervention as much anymore is because everything that I predicted about the municipal takeover of the system has come to fruition.  There just isn't anything left to say about it, and now the program will limp along in a reduced capacity just as planned.  The transition to the State Fiscal Agent system was intended to destroy the program as it was previously designed and that objective has been met.  In place of the

The following Twitter conversation underscores the problems with use of a population health model in an occupational therapy context: Framing a conversation about the need for older drivers to consider their abilities underneath a context of population statistics is in direct conflict with the profession's Core Value of respect for patient autonomy and individuality. Although it may be true that there are descriptive statistics about driving safety, numbers of accidents, and other factors associated with elderly drivers, when we lead our conversations with talk about the broad population we are adopting a potentially ageist stance that restricts the freedom of many drivers who are not falling within those normative ranges. This is the problem with use of a population health model for meeting the needs of individuals.  To describe this problem within a general systems theory framework, consider the following chart: Within this traditional framework of intervention, the