Aggression and TBI

I did a journal review this week, an article found by a collegue who has a subscription to the British Journal of OT. The title is “Occupational Therapists’ Perceptions and Management of Aggression related to Adults with a Brain Injury”, written by K.Beauliu (2007) 70(4).

The whole article raised some interesting points, including

• physical aggression towards OT is most common when helping with ADL’s
• agression is related to fear of failure when presented with challenging assessments
• OT’s dont tend to blame patients for their aggressive behaviour, instead they see it as a sympton of their TBI
• OT’s avoid the behavioural approach when managing aggression, instead opt for preventative strategies by eliminating the perceived cause of aggression

But most importantly – we need training!! This dramatically improves our confidence in managing aggressive behaviour, and therefore reduces the incidence of aggression.

It’s worth a looking into.

Please laugh

I have a friend who is in her last year of studying to be an Occupational Therapist.
And bless her little cotton socks she is busting to get out of the classroom and into the real world.
Apparently there’s a joke going around the OT school, so I though I’d share it with all who are interested…

Q: How many Occupational Therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. We’d teach the lightbulb to change itself.

And on that note, hope I’ve brightened someones day.

Working with numbers

My work environment has recently become quite quiet. Quietness is relative, if your overloaded and overworked, then having a normal workload can be thought of as ‘quiet’. There has been a mazz exodus, discharge after discharge, which has left me with time to actually stop and think. This lead to some fantastic OT rehabilitation! With a reduced caseload I had the time I needed to engage with my patients, and to make a real difference in their lives in only 2 weeks of their stay as an inpatient.

The admissions are slowly filling up the ward again, and I’m finding myself almost laughing at how how my practice is going to return to fast-paced semi chaos, because I’ve been so enjoying a reduced case load and the amazing opportunities to do all I want to for my patients.

Is this sustainable? Is it fair to us or the people we treat? Is accepting the minimal standard acceptable? I certainly hope not!!

My homework

I’ve just posted a comment on MetaOT‘s website, which is great for my learning. I can really see the potential if all OT’s who were on the web started a blog and shared their bookmarks with the rest of the world, what a big step that could be for us! But time time time, that’s what it takes. Maybe if the few of us keep this up and do the hard work, it won’t seem like such a big deal for others to catch on. Here’s hoping, for my blog and for others.

Another day in paradise

Having someone to help you make sense of blogging really does make everything easier. Which means I’m learning more, and maybe that means writing more…

How do you do the best work you can, when there’s not enough of you, and you have to rely on other people? I dont have an answer, and even if I did, it probably wouldn’t make my job any easier, or more efficient, or even up the standard of what I do.  A lot of the time I feel as though my patients are being ripped off, missing out on important therapy. I don’t like having to comprimise, choosing one person over another, or only having enough time to do the bare minimum; working this way is as opposite as you can get when we think about the OT philosphy of ‘holistic’. Aren’t we supposed to address everything in respect to everything else? Treat the whole person? Look at the outside, the inside, the environement, the good, the not so good? My practice these days is dysfunction based, not holistic.

I sometimes wonder what patients and their families think of the occupational therapy breed. I fear they may get the wrong impression that we shower people, give them commodes, or ask them out-of-context questions when trying to work out how good their memory is.

I want to restore others faith in us and what we do. But how do I,  how do we do that, when we dont have the opportunities to prove them otherwise…?

It’s been a while

Thinking about writing an entry in my blog at times seems too hard, so I put it off, and put it off. I guess like anything it’s taking time for me to get my head around this concept, and I need to be an OT to myself that reminds me every time I do something new (ie this blog) I am reinforcing the brain pathways that will hopefully make this easier with practise.

My OT pracise seems to be a like a bunch of monkeys swinging around in my head; so many ideas and so little resources – it’s so frustrating!! So I’ll leave it there and come back to this, maybe a bit more reflection next time.

My 1st blog entry!

Welcome to my blog. This is very new and I still don’t know what I’m doing – someone is telling me where to point and click!

It is an experiement, the OT school in Dunedin NZ are doing research on how to use the web for professional development, and I’m helping them.

So, here we go, hold on…!