Kumpulan A presentation -- OT in diabetes care

Back to 24/10/12, our group had successfully presented our group presentation, that is Occupational Therapy in Diabetes Care.

Before the presentation, our group leader had delegated the job and i was ordered to prepare assessment of occupational therapy in diabetes.

From the beginning, i thought it will be very easy and i just did few slides with OT assessment and assessment tools. So when the leader asked the slide from me, i just passed it up without correct it. So, my group members reviewed my slide and asked me what i am going to present with those few slides because the title already very clearly stated, OT in diabetes care. By that time, i still didn't admitted i was wrong and just blaming them for not understand me.

So i corrected the slide but there was not much improvement. Basically i just add in more assessment and assessment tools. My group members reviewed it again and one of them started to send me some journals and asked me to correct it. So i read through them and tried to correct them all over again. I read a presentation from AOTA that about OT and diabetes. I go through the presentation and i was still not clear about what i can prepare my slide from it. So i asked my group member's opinion and he seem like gave up on me because he already explained to me for few times. At this point, i was overwhelming by inferior. I blame myself for being slow and why others can be so clever? Thank God the feeling was not persisted for a long time. Few hours later, i managed to back on the track and continue with my slide preparation.

Thank to the member, i managed to prepare my slide according to the AADE 7 Self-Care Behaviors that was presented by AOTA. In AADE 7 Self-Care Behaviors,  there are Healthy eating, Being active, Healthy coping, Problem solving, Risk reduction, Monitoring and Taking medication. AADE 7 Self-Care Behaviors are more to changes in lifestyle to cope with diabetes.

So for each behaviors, we can actually assess the patient. For example, being active, we can assess patient by using leisure checklist to identify patients' leisure hobby and design an activity for them to involve so that they can stay active. For taking medication self care behavior, as an OT we can assess the patient's IADL to identify his/her dependency in taking medication. Then, we can carry out intervention if the patient unable to take medication independently.

On the day of presentation, our presentation was actually over time. Encik Hibatullah was the person in charge to evaluate us and i don't know he is an OT! felt so embarassing after i got to know he is an OT. Lesson learnt, try to understand your evaluator before your presentation. Overall, our presentation was good but we emphasized too much on medical part. Since the title already stated OT in diabetes care, so we should more focus on OT part. We hope we can improved from time to time in preparation and presentation of our group work. I would like to thank to the member who actually assist me in doing my part, actually he can just ignored me and just go on with her own part but thank God he didn't do so. I was glad full i had so awesome group member who willing to sacrifice his time to give me advice and guidance.

We made it!

12/12/12, a beautiful date, and finally we had done with our Health Promotion Project!

The project started with many unexpected problems.

First of all, i applied the bus to fetch us at faculty at 6.30am but the officer said because it's 'bus sewa', so we need to wait until 7am. All of us had gathered at faculty at 7.20am but the bus still didn't come and we don't have the bus driver's handphone number because he's from outside. So we had to call the officer and he told me the bus will only come at 7.30am. We waited until 7.45am but the bus still didn't turn up. Everyone was nervous because we worried that we couldn't reach there on time. Finally, the bus came at 7.50am.

We thought everything going to be fine but the bus stopped halfway. It really freak me out because we were rushing out of time! Thank God the bus able to be started again and ran smoothly. Along the way to Rawang, the bus stopped for few times and we even can smelled bad odour in the bus. Like plastic being burnt. And we even lost in Rawang because we couldn't find the way to the school. And the time shown is almost 9am! we were late for 1 hour plus! So we decided to carry out backup plan which is cancelled all the speeches and straight into the talk.

When we reached the school, it's already 9am plus plus. We felt embarrassing because we were the organizer! And the things shocked me the most was the meeting room. I never thought it could be that small and crowded. It was so difficult for us to move in the meeting room. And i also never thought that there will be so many children attending the talk. I can see that some of the parents couldn't concentrate on the talk because they were being distracted by their children.

A super active children caught my attention so i decided to go and calm him down so that his parents could concentrate on the talk. Things are never as smooth as i thought. The boy is super naughty and active and he never listen to me! It was so frustrating to deal with him. I tried so many ways to calm him down, to catch his attention but all were failed. I felt so discouraged! After some time, i thought of giving him a piece of blank paper and asked him to draw something on the paper. It worked! The little boys became so concentrate in drawing and he able to sit there for more than 10 minutes. I being told by the boy's father that he likes to draw and write at home. So this experience made me a little bit more understand about children. We need to find something that they fancy to catch their attention.

Then, i got chance to talk to a mother to a cerebral palsy children. She told me her daughter being treated by occupational therapy but it stopped now because of the transportation problem. The nearest hospitals that provide occupational therapy service are Selayang and Sungai Buloh. It's actually quite a distance from Rawang. So she has no choice to stop the therapy because of the transportation problem. I interviewed and asked her whether her daughter has some improvement after received occupational therapy and she answered me YES! it was actually a very encouraging answer. And she said the therapy need to be continuous so that the improvement will be more visible. So it was kinda sad that her daughter had stopped the treatment for about 1 year. We actually prepared list of Rehabilitation for Children with Special Needs in Rawang area so i hope it can help the parents with transportation problem.

The talk that given by Puan Mahfuzah was actually good and informative and role of occupational therapist was clearly explained but i think it was too long and some of the parents/teachers had lost their interest and concentration and started to feel sleepy. And some of the terms used by Puan Mahfuzah is in English so i think some of the parents might get confused about the meaning of the words. And the meeting room really not an ideal place to held the talk because when Puan Mahfuzah was demo in front of the room, the parents/teachers at the back not able to see what she was doing at the front there.

While proceed to support group, some of us were assigned to bring the kids to outside so that the parents can concentrate on it. Maybe we were lacking of communication, some of our group members were assigned to bring the children to outside including me. After that i felt it was kinda strange, why not the volunteers bring them out while our own group members stayed in? Why were the volunteers stayed in while it was our group project? In order not to miss the section, i decided to change with the volunteer so that i can stay and to see how the support group worked.

But the support group was actually quite helpful for the parents and teachers. I can saw that there are some parents very supportive and able to voice out their thoughts and opinion. While others able to give their feedback and motivation to the parents that need help. So i hope that social group can continue to carry on so that the parents and teachers can gained some opinion/feedback/motivation from there.

From the questionnaires that we collected back, we can see that many of the parents were not exposed to occupational therapy. So from carrying out this project, i think most of them now are more familiar with what occupational therapy is and how we can help their children with special needs. And some of the parents even proposed to make this project as annual project. It's very motivating to see this kind of comment!

There are so many unexpected problems occurred but thank God we managed to overcome them. Thank you every group members who had sacrificed their time/energy to carry out this project and thanks to the lovely coursemates because they were willing to be volunteers for our project. Without them, i think our project can't be carried out successfully because there were so many kids to handle! Thanks to Puan Mahfuzah willing to be our speaker and share her experiences and knowledge to the audiences! Thanks to Dr Saz willing to come to supervise our projects and gave us so many useful advice and help. Thanks to all the teachers and parents who willing to come and support the project. Without them, there were be meaningless to carry out the project. THANK YOU EVERYONE!

Finally done with Worksheet step 4, what a relieved!

Luckily our group had done with paper work that with objectives, it made our job more easy. I need to find out possible strategies to achieved the objectives that we had developed. It is not a tough job for me to identify the possible strategies as our group had discussed it before. The only thing i found hard to elaborate is the government support.

I am still not clear with the role of government in our project. Yeah, i knew that we need to get approval from JPN in order to carry out the talk in the school, so what government can do with occupational therapy in special education?

I am still not yet clear about the Malaysia education system and the laws about the children with special needs. So in order to get involve myself in education, i need to be more hardworking to understand the education system. What Ministry of Health can do? What Ministry of Education can do? How do we collaborate with them to help the children with special needs? What is the procedure if we want to involve ourselves in special education? What we can do with children with special needs in education system?

Tons of questions been popped out in my mind when i am doing the step 4. Hopefully i will clear about it during the talk. I think i will be one of the participant instead of organizer. =P

Finally, our project came to the last step! We are going to make it! Lots of things need to settle by next week so all the best to my group members! Together, we stand! :)

When we are preparing for our health promotion project, I had learned lots of things that can't be learn from our textbook.

For example, we need to write an official letter to the speaker, JPN and the school. Lecturer never teach us how to write a formal letter, where to find the letter cover, what is the latest format of the letter and many more. Here, we need to learn ourselves and explore all the sources that we had. This can train us to be more familiar with paper work that is important when we are start working in society. Specially need to thank to the group members who worked hard to complete the letters and Dr Saz for the correction and advice. We finally managed to send out the letters to the different representatives successfully.

Besides that, as a secretary, i need to email the letters to different representatives. From this, i had learned the proper way and proper language to approach them. I had seek for some advice from group members and also surfing the internet to check out the proper way to email. By doing this, i had gained one more skill, that is email, which is useful whenever we are studying or working.

When doing this project, sometimes i felt self-abased and i tend to push the responsibilities to others. I felt i am not enough qualification to do the task. In fact, i am lazy. So, i had to learn to push and motivate myself in completing the task because everyone is working hard to complete their own task. I also learned to practice the 'evidence-based practice' which is to find evidence to support my ideas. This is to ready myself because in forth year we are going to do research and what we need to do is find and find the articles and journals.

Here comes my very 1st reflective writing on our group project.

Thank God i had been placed in the group with Song Yu Seng, Yek Na Nai, Nurul Huda, Nadiah Shaharom and Tengku Azri. We all managed to communicate well and co-operate with each other well. From the 1st meeting till now, we had no problem with our communication and everyone had contributed their own idea. From this, i had learned that, everyone have their own strong point. We should not judge someone based on their academic result or their look.

From this group project, i acknowledged the 'pro-ness' and activeness of Nurul Huda and Nadiah Shaharom. Normally when we have class, they are just play their role as 'quite and passive student'. But since this project started until today, i can see they are very active in giving ideas and they are also working hard to complete all the tasks given. I am quite shocked when i got to know they almost done the homework that given by Dr Saz. It supposed to be group work but they finished them without any complaint. I learned something from them. As one of the member of the group, we shall try our best to complete every tasks that given. We should not give any excuses to escape from any tasks, as our group members able to finished  them.

Frankly, Tengku Azri didn't joined the group discussion started from the beginning until today. We are actually quite frustrated with him but we can't do anything. Now what we can do is we just do his job and try to contact him as we didn't saw him for few days already. As a member of the group, we should fully commit ourselves but not try to shirk away the responsibility. This will cause inconvenient for the other group members. As we already lack of 'human resources', we should even more contribute our best to the group to go through every stages.

I don't know is this called reflective writing but this is my thought so far.

Thank you every members for the hard work! Together, we walk!

Journal reflective writing

Journal: Teachers' perception of the role and effectiveness of occupational therapist in school

This study is about teachers' expectations from occupational therapists working with exceptional children in two Ontario public school boards.

There were four major findings for occupational therapists.

1. all teachers valued the work of occupational therapists in schools
2. teachers expressed confusion over the roles of occupational therapist
3. teachers disagreed with occupational therapists about some of their roles
4. teachers believed occupational therapists need to develop a greater awareness of the needs of the educational system.

The teachers who worked with occupational therapist identified several strengths of occupational therapy sevices.

• It enhances a student's ability to learn and develop
• It eliminate problems that interfere with a child's ability to profit from instruction
• Occupational therapists able to work on a team with teachers, parents, other school professionals and community agencies
• Occupational therapist could provide medical, physical and developmental information in educationally relevant terms
• Occupational therapist able to translate assessment information into relevant programming.
• Occupational therapist do not use too much medical 'jargon' and have a broad perspective on children and child development

The study shown the teachers who worked with occupational therapist had a positive perception on them. But there is also some teachers confused about the role of occupational therapist. So besides promoting OT among the parents, we also have to include in the teachers. This is because teachers are going to collaborate with the OT to help the children with special needs.

Considering about the culture and context, we might found there is difficulty to promote OT among the parents and teachers. Malaysian is not well exposed to occupational therapy and maybe it is hard for them to accept OT to aid in their education. 

Besides that, as an OT who is going to work in special education, we also need to understand the education system in Malaysia. We should have sufficient knowledge and understanding of educational priorities, theories, and service delivery system. This is to make sure that we as an OT can understand and clear how the education system work so that we can know what intervention we can implement and how to carry it out.