Occupational Collaboration Paper

Occupational Therapy is a profession primarily centred around client-therapist interactions. The main objective of an occupational therapist (OT) is to empower and assist their clients in their return to everyday life and activities. Occupational therapists work with their clients for extended periods of time in order to ensure that they are able to participate in their normal daily routines with some degree of ease. OT's achieve this goal through building trust and rapport with their clients by representing themselves with the highest degree of professional identity and following the codes of conduct, to which ensures safety to all involved in the achievement of this goal. As occupational therapists work closely with a number of different

Interprofessional collaboration involves a continuous interaction and knowledge sharing between professionals that will help improve patient care and outcomes. American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2011) describes four competency domains to include:

The Occupational Therapy profession is advocating for clients and profession itself in different ways to guarantee the access to the services. The Occupational Therapy Practice Framework: Domain and Process defines advocacy as “efforts directed toward promoting occupational justice and empowering clients to seek and obtain resources to fully participate in daily life occupations. The outcomes of advocacy and self-advocacy support health, well-being, and occupational participation at the individual or systems level”(AOTA, 2014). The American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) are been advocating in the US legislature and they have multiple tools and information for professionals to advocate for our clients and profession. In the last

Ralph Emerson once said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful … to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” I chose the profession of occupational therapy to embrace this rationale of life; to encourage others to help themselves and discover the resilience and strength they have to successfully re-integrate with their community. At Hunter College I majored in psychology and I wanted to continue to apply this knowledge through a health care career. Occupational Therapy effectively concentrates on the psychological, emotional, and physical well-being of the patient, while facilitating those individuals with illnesses or injuries to re-learn everyday tasks.

(Arnold and Boggs, 2011, p. 474). There is a distinct purpose for team meetings that is concentrated on a discussion about targeted clients and their family need and attaining related treatment goals. “Interprofessional and interdisciplinary collaborations require deliberate effort on the part of the groups involved. The key to collaboration is recognizing and having the present the components that are necessary and sufficient for the collaboration to work”. (Pressler & Kenner, 2012). “Collaboration is an essential feature of nursing work and is seen as a central nursing competency, nurses often find that collaborative practice can be challenging within contemporary health care settings” (Doane & Varco, 2015, p. 397). Some nurses go as far as to ignore or avoid the collaborative aspect of their work, there are many factors as to why they would do this, lack of knowledge sharing, a misconstrued perception of reciprocity and equity of status, the hierarchy of power between interprofessional colleagues, and some nurses elicited, “individual anxiety, avoidance behaviors and defensive professional efforts” (Doane & Varco, 2015, P. 397) as their reasons. The professional consequences of these actions for nurses are “a poorer comprehension and

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has a strong stance on nurses and leadership. They believe that nurses are a vital component to health care system and nurses in leadership roles can have a positive impact on such. Nurses are in all sorts of roles within the health care systems ranging from a staff nurse, nurse managers, to advance practice, all the way to congress (Finkelman & Kenner, 2013). In addition, they even serve in the boardroom within some health care organizations. Leadership doesn’t necessarily mean a nurse in a manager position, but a nurse who has an influence on staff. (Finkelman, et al, 2013). The importance to having all health care members working together in leadership roles is imperative to positive changes within the health care setting. Nurses can give an insight on matters that only a nurse can, and this is an important viewpoint that needs to be included when

Effective communication is a key component of interprofessional practice to provide the best care for a patient treated by a multidisciplinary team. In my future profession as an occupational therapist there will be many important roles and responsibilities to consider across different specialities. Occupational therapists regularly work with nurses within an interdisciplinary team and the two health professions must practice effective communication, and the skills which foster the effectiveness. Occupational therapists, nurses, and the communication skills these professional require to work in an interdisciplinary team will be discussed.

Nurse’s role has a unique contribution in the interprofessional team. The interprofessional team are group of individuals in a various healthcare disciplines communicating and working together towards common goals to provide quality, individualized care for patients. Each team members from different profession and occupation collaborates, supports, enhances, and provides knowledge, skills, and attitudes to coordinate processes and interventions. Nurse’s offers specialized service to society to meet the health care needs of their clients.

Some of the databases that were searched for information about my PICOT questions were not directly related to patients in long-term care facilities. The Databases that were searched included CINAHL, National Guideline Clearing House, Ovid, and EBSCO, articles related to my PICOT was found on National Guideline Clearing House and Ovid. Some of the key words that were used during the search were Hendrich II fall risk tool, fall in Long-term care facilities, Geriatric falls, fall prevention and predicting fall. National Guideline Clearing (www.guideline.gov) produced about ten results directly related to the content in the PICOT question and CINAHL had thirty nine results.

The word ‘team’ can be defined as a group of people working together towards a common goal. A team also generally is known as a group of people with different skills and different tasks, who works together on a common project, services, or goal. Then, the important thing in teamwork is ‘collaboration’, which is the act of working effectively with others to achieve a common goal. Collaboration acts as the lifeblood in the team, even the team is not large enough, but the collaboration is required.

Interprofessional collaboration amongst health and non-health professionals is integral in optimizing health outcomes and promoting health. This is an important concept that is practiced by nurses on a daily basis, especially in a community setting. Interprofessional

For the practice of Occupational Therapy it teaches meaningful, functional, and adaptive life skills; it is a profession that enhances activities of daily living (ADL), and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL). IADL’s including community mobility, is a critical area for the United States citizens. Driving is an instrumental activity that needs addressed with each client for safety and testing motor movements. Between 2002 and 2012, more than 1.5 million U.S. soldiers returned to the United States after an active duty Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraq Freedom (OIF; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs [VA], 2012a). Soldiers are trained specifically to what branch of service they’re going into. Going through strict training their units,

Getting out of bed is one of the dangerous things that the elderly patients do when they are admitted in the hospital. Study conducted by Ambrose, Paul & Hausdorff, (2013) on patient falls reveals that a majority of falls in the elderly patients occur between 0700 and 1900, especially when they are getting out of bed to use the rest room. The cause of their falls is mainly due to unsteady gait, memory loss, confusion that comes with age.

“Orthostatic hypotension is a condition in which there is insufficient recovery of the blood pressure drop which occurs after getting up, which causes a temporary reduction of cerebral perfusion. This increases the risk of falls resulting in injuries (JAHR, 2018).” When lying blood pools in the legs and the abdomen when changing positions from lying, to sitting, to standing. A person may exhibit clinical symptoms of OH when systolic pressure drops below at least 20 mmHg and diastolic drops at least 10 mmHg during position transition.

Article I. The article published by Ivziku, Matarese, Pedone (2011) was a literature review to evaluate the predictive validity and inter-rater reliability of Hendrich fall risk model II (HFRM II).The literature focused on ways to identify older patients at risk of falling in geriatric units with the implementation of the HFRM II and recommend its use in clinical practice. A prospective descriptive design was used. The study was carried out in a geriatric acute care unit of an Italian University hospital. The patoients that were admitted to the geriatric unit were 65 in an Italian University hospital over 8-month period were enrolled. The patients enrolled were screened for the falls risk by nurses with the HFRM II within 24h of admission.