AOTA 2021 Standards for Continuing Competence in Occupational Therapy

Continuing competence is essential to occupational therapists and occupational therapy assistants for fulfilling their roles and abilities across experience, context, and time. It requires an ongoing process to keep up with new developments related to the profession and specialty areas throughout one’s career (i.e., early, mid-, late, change, or reentry). To build capacity, occupational therapists and occupational therapy assistants must commit to a process of self-assessment, reflecting on, in, and toward action to advance the knowledge, professional reasoning, interpersonal skills, performance skills, and ethical practice necessary to perform current and future roles and responsibilities within the profession. The American Occupational Therapy Association’s Standards for Continuing Competence serve as a foundation for analyzing the occupation in regard to continuing competence. These standards can be viewed separately and collectively and can be combined with other standards documents to gain an overarching perspective.

Art Therapy Workshop as an Offer for a Young Educator: From the Perspective of an Art Therapist/Theater Therapist

Today’s educators experience more anxiety, stress and burnout than ever before, which is why there is growing interest of this professional group in art therapy projects that focus on supporting the development of personal and interpersonal skills. Art workshops are in demand in particular among education students, who experience a certain range of emotional stress when they encounter things that astonish them and cause an invigorating shock. Thus, they can understand how to deal with various emotions, both their own and other people’s especially when they have deficiencies in this field and they are seeking improvement. As a result, students—future teachers—become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses and more actively manage their well-being and commitment to self development.

Conceptualizing and Engaging in Reflective Practice: Experienced Evaluators’ Perspectives

The purpose of this study was to determine professional evaluators’ perceptions of reflective practice (RP) and the extent and manner in which they engage in RP behaviors. Nineteen evaluators with 10 or more years of experience in the evaluation field were interviewed to explore our understanding and practice of RP in evaluation. Findings suggest that RP is a process of self and contextual awareness, involving thinking and questioning, and individual and group meaning-making, focused on facilitating growth in the form of learning and improvement. The roles of individual and collaborative reflection as well as reflection in- and on-action are also discussed. Findings support a call for the further refinement of our understanding of RP in evaluation practice. Evaluators seeking to be better reflective practitioners should be competent in skills such as facilitation and interpersonal skills, as well as budget needed time for RP in evaluation accordingly.

Challenges and Mitigation in Achieving Successful Project Handover

This paper will describe the common challenges faced by both Project Management Team (PMT) and Asset Owner when projects come to the tail end and due for handover. It highlights the impact of improper handover of projects to the company as a whole and provides some proposals to address the common project handover issues. This paper will cover mainly on project handovers for upstream projects especially related to offshore facilities. This paper is written based on sample of projects done at offshore Malaysia. It highlights the common handover issues such as PMT not able to handover timely to the Asset Owner although the facilities are running, and production had been achieved. The longer it takes to handover, the more monetary value leakage will be wasted as a result of no equipment preventive maintenance, warranty of equipment could expire or void, and paying higher construction insurance coverage. This can be prevented by a proper and early planning in managing handover, inclusion of segmented provisional acceptance criteria in the contract as well as having frequent engagement between PMT and Asset Owner prior to stages of handover during project execution. Understanding of each stakeholders' expectations is also one of the key success factors. This paper will conclude that there are many common handover issues when it comes to project handover. Most of the issues are the results of misunderstanding of each stakeholder's expectation, poor early handover planning and unclear scope of acceptance in the contract. In most cases the impact will lead to unrealized monetary value leakage. Early handover planning, clear scope covered in the contract, good coordination between PMT and Asset Owner, good teamwork and mindset, blending with some interpersonal skills in managing conflicts are among the key success factors. The key highlights in this paper will help PMT and Asset Owner in better managing the project handover. This will improve project delivery to meet target schedule within scope and budget. This will eventually safeguard overall company investment and avoid any risk on uncertainty of care and custody transfer at the end of a project life cycle.

ENCOURAGING STEM INTEREST AMONG HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS THROUGH JIC AND YSSC COMPETITION

To cultivate STEM interest amongst high school students, a STEM carnival organized by PPST, UMS was conducted through Junior Innovator Competition (JIC) and Young Scientist Sci-Show Competition (YSSC). The competitions were participated by high school students from Sabah, Sarawak, and F.T Labuan. JIC requires a poster presentation for prototype innovation while YSSC requires a short video presentation about science knowledge learned in the school syllabus. The objective was to gauge JIC and YSSC effectiveness in students’ interest in STEM. A three-star rating Malaysia Research Assessment Instrument (MyRA) questionnaire resulted in 80% total feedback (Q1-Q6), as a principal in MyRA. The result indicated knowledge, attitude, skills, and aspiration (KASA) transformation amongst the students. Three main aspects were summarized from Q1-Q6: learning (Q1 & Q2), interpersonal skill (Q3 & Q4), and STEM interest (Q5 & Q6). Around 82% of students agreed that JIC and YSSC were able to increase their knowledge, interpersonal skills around 81%, as well as 84 - 88% in critical thinking. While 83.7% - 85.3% of students satisfactorily increased their STEM interest and 85% were willing to participate in future competitions. Interestingly, some ex-participants entered the PPST for Foundation in Science. Indeed, competitions such as JIC and YSSC have demonstrated an inclining STEM interest effect toward high school students.

Patient perceptions of allied health student communication and interpersonal skills: A cross-sectional study

Introduction: Effective patient–practitioner communication contributes to patient health outcomes by strengthening therapeutic relationships and, in the process, contributing to overall quality of patient care. Despite the growth of student-led university teaching clinics, little research has investigated communication skills within this context. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the patient-perceived levels of communication and interpersonal skills within a student-led allied health clinic.Methods: The Communication Assessment Tool (CAT) was used to collect cross-sectional data on patients’ perceptions of student communication and interpersonal skills within an osteopathy teaching clinic. Data were analysed via descriptive and inferential statistics.Results: According to the CAT, patients perceived the students’ communication and interpersonal skills to be “excellent” overall (97.2%). No significant differences were found between percentage of “excellent” responses and gender (p = .600), number of consultations (p = .374) or pain duration (p = .741).Conclusions: Patients in this setting perceive student communication and interpersonal skills to be of a high standard. This can contribute positively to the patient–practitioner therapeutic alliance and may improve overall health outcomes. These findings have implications for communication training within student-led health professions clinics and tertiary curricula more broadly.

The Performer

Skillfully singing or playing an instrument, even at a very advanced level, is not enough by itself to ensure success as a performer. Musicians who give live performances must also use body gesture, facial expression, and other elements of stage presence to enhance their musical sound production. The visual aspects of live performance are influential to how audiences perceive the music, and therefore critical to performance. Additionally, outside of unaccompanied solo performing, musicians must know how to function effectively with coperformers, both in terms of musically coordinating performance (e.g., synchronizing multiple parts and performing in tune with each other) and communicating—both verbally and nonverbally—with each other. This chapter examines aspects of being a performer that are sometimes overlooked. Music performers can gain much by giving explicit attention to mastering the visual aspects of live performance and the interpersonal skills of musical collaboration.