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Occupational Therapists: An occupational therapists' role in helping injured, ill and disabled patients develop self-aware skills

   

Added on  2021-06-14

11 Pages3079 Words219 Views
Running head: REFLECTION ASSIGNMENTREFLECTION ASSIGNMENTName of the student:Name of the university:Author note:

REFLECTION ASSIGNMENTIntroduction:Occupational therapists are professionals who are seen to treat injured, ill as well asdisabled patients through the therapeutic use of everyday activities. They are seen to help thepatients develop, recover, improve as well as become capable of maintaining skills needed fordaily living as well as working (Halloway and Galvin 2016). The main aim of the occupationaltherapist is to help people increase their functional independence in their daily lives at the sametime of preventing and minimising disability. They usually treat different types of work relatedinjuries, amputees, stroke cases, arthritis patients, mental health problems, head injuries, peoplesuffering from burns. They have to follow professional conduct and ethical and legal guidelinesso that they can not only provide high quality care to patients but also maintain their human andcivil rights in the nation they reside (Zucker et al., 2018). Therefore, it is important for thehealthcare professionals to reflect on their practices, identify the good part or wrong part aboutthe experiences and analyse the experiences to develop the practice for the future. Thisassignment will portray one of my experiences that i went through while providing care in myplacement sessions and how my reflecting on the incident had helped me evolve out as a betterperson and a better professional for the future.Description:During my clinical placement, I was assigned as an occupational therapist to Mrs. Leewho was a 65 year old woman living in the same community of our organisation. She had muchdifficulty in leading life as she used to stay alone in her house and her son and his family livestwo other communities away. She had mobility issues and she was gradually losing herindependence due to her chronic disorder of osteoarthritis. She used to face tremendous pain in

REFLECTION ASSIGNMENTher joints and bones and her muscles were gradually getting stiff making her livinguncomfortable and dependable on others. She had always been of independent mind and neverwanted to be a burden on any other members of the family. Therefore, she contacted theorganisation and asked help to develop her mobility and her gain back her confidence andindependence back. She was a gentle woman with whom I was able to engage in effectivecommunication successfully and a therapeutic relationship was developed between her and me.She was very happy with my services and started to rely on me both emotionally and mentally.Due to her gain of trust, it become easier for me to provide high quality care and she was entirelycomplaint with me in every of my treatment plan. On one specific day, I had applied for leave tothe organisation that I would be taking the next day. Therefore, the centre head asked me to takeone of another member with me to Mrs. Lee’s home in order to help her understand the patientand her needs, as she would be working on my behalf with the patient the next day. Mycolleague Sarah is of curious nature and therefore she became quite surprised when she came toknow that Mrs. Lees trusts me with her back documents as well. As Mrs. Lee has restrictedmobility, she asks me to hand her bank documents from closet and keeps them accordingly afterher work is over with the documents. She became quite anxious and repeatedly asked me thefinancial amount she has in her bank. Although I repeatedly denied, she continued to ask me andat one time she became so hard to handle that I declared her the amount verbally. She was quiteshocked to hear the amount as she had high financial security. The next day when I was on leave,she was engaged in a communication with the patient and stated her “Wow! You are so rich! Didyou have a business or is this savings throughout life”. This statement affected the patientimmensely and the next day she called the centre and complained about me stating that I hadbreached her privacy and confidentiality.

REFLECTION ASSIGNMENTFeeling:I was completely shattered after hearing the entire incident from my mentor in theorganisation. I could not believe my ears that at such a tender age of my career, I have committedsuch serious crime by affecting the confidentiality of my client. I was going through a number ofmixed emotions and feelings. Firstly, I felt low and bad because I could not keep the trust of myclient who believed on me with closed eyes in every of my interventions that I planned for her.We shared a bond of trust, mutual respect, empathy and care for each other that in turn helpedme to practice my skills fully while caring for her. Besides feeling low and bad, I also feel guiltythat I could not keep the trust that was bestowed on me. I also felt shameful that even afterknowing the ethical and legal guidelines for practicing occupational therapy, I could not followall the ethical guidelines successfully. I started feeling loss of confidence in my approach as I feltthat I failed miserably in providing ethically and legally competent care of the patient. Although ifelt annoyed with my colleague initially for revealing the information, but later I did not held herguilty as it was me who had the responsibility of protecting her data and information.Evaluation: In this step, I need to enlighten what was bad and good about the incident. The bad partof the incident was that in my very first placement experience, I was not able to provide anethically and legally appropriate service. Confidentiality as well as privacy is one of the mostimportant aspects of caring for patients in order to maintain their human rights and to protectthem from any harmful or hazardous situations (Stojkovic et al. 2017). I failed miserably inprotecting the confidentiality of the patient and my activity had exposed her to various number of

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