Assignment: Occupational Therapists
Assignment: Occupational Therapists
I address you today with a sense of pride and great thanks for your recognition for this most singular honor. I am also thankful for the opportunity to have experienced the year of growth the responsibility of this honor imposed. I hope to share with you my perspective of occupational therapy and its position in the health system. Occu-
pational therapists’ tremendous commitment to Man and to his ability to shape his destiny through activity and accomplishment puts us in a very favorable position because we provide a service that the health care sys- tem is reorganizing to assure it is delivered. Our responsibility as a profession is to implement a broader per- spective of health care delivery—one that places its values on individuals as they accept the responsibility for their own health status. To accomplish this task, I want to lead you through a process of assessment, recognition, and strategy develop-
ment. For my framework, I will use the process each of us uses daily in our service delivery.
The Referral Has Been Received
“The health care system must be directed at improving the health of the American people by encouraging health, providing constructive behavior and improving the effectiveness of our medical care system” (1, p. iii). This man- date (our referral) came from President Jimmy Carter in his introductory remarks in the Department of Health, Edu- cation, and Welfare’s publication Health and United States, 1978 (1).
The Problems Requiring Management. 1. High quality health care at a reasonable cost is often inaccessible. 2. Health care is beyond the means of many. 3. The system is focusing on hospital acute care rather than ambulatory and preventive care. 4. Technology has been exploited. 5. There is poor distribution of medical personnel. 6. Human beings are not allowed to control their own health status (2). The Goal. Organize and humanize the system. Requested Service. Develop a plan for implementation to effect change as quickly and as simply as possible. To meet this challenge our profession must develop a plan—thus we need a “treatment plan.” We always perform an assessment before establishing a plan. Only when we have a sense of the total picture can
we have vision. The health care system is very complex and involves many characters. Our first process, that of assess- ment, involves seeking to understand each of the characters and their contributions to the current health care dilemma.
1980 Eleanor Clarke Slagle Lecture
Occupational Therapists Put Care in the Health System
Carolyn Manville Baum, MA, OTR, FAOTA
30
Originally published 1980 in American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 34, 505–516. https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.34.8.505
104082-30_CH30.qxd:2602-29_CH29rev.qxd 3/1/17 5:20 PM Page 229
Purchased from AOTA for the exclusive use of Saleh Bukhamsin ([email protected] 000004590130) © 2019 AOTA. Please report unauthorized use to [email protected]
https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.34.8.505
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
