ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog

  The American Council of Academic Physical Therapy (ACAPT) recently published a paper entitled "Future of physical therapist education programs in higher education."  This paper should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the proliferation of some allied health programs, credential escalation, and the intersection of these issues with practice. For starters, it is important to disambiguate ACAPT from CAPTE (Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education) .  CAPTE grants accreditation to entry level programs for the physical therapy profession, and although 'independent' is also a part of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) .  ACAPT is a membership association of physical therapy educational programs and their educators.  ACAPT is also an offshoot of the APTA.  This complex relationship makes the ACAPT position statement rather interesting. The ACAPT paper identifies a few key points: 1. There are more PT programs being developed and

  Simulation is a methodology used to replicate real-world tasks.  Simulation provides experiences that lead to direct learning or that can be used as an assessment of competence.  Such tasks have been used as a primary tactic in occupational therapy and other rehabilitation services since their inception - although they were generally applied in a therapeutic context.  For example, an individual would learn how to dress themselves out of context to develop skill, and then that skill would be transferred to contextual learning.  Sometimes, more esoterically, a simulated activity broken down into components would be used to practice parts of tasks that would then be scaffolded in a total practice method.  Either way, simulated experiences are a staple methodology used by occupational therapy professionals for many years. Over time, preferences emerged for 'real-world' and 'contextually-relevant' experience - so much so that entire service delivery systems incorporated &#