Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Scholarly Project

Degree Name

Master of Occupational Therapy (MOT)

Department

Occupational Therapy

First Advisor

Sarah Nielsen

Keywords

Cultural Competency; Occupational Therapy -- education; Preceptorship

Abstract

Background Cultural competency is an awareness and incorporation of knowledge about individuals and groups of people into specific policies, practices, standards and attitudes by incorporating the client's personal views, values and belief (Suk, Oh, & Im, 2018). Although it is important for future health care professionals and faculty to understand our growing diverse population, there is little to no emphasis on improving the interactions of diverse students and their fieldwork educators. Currently, there is no literature that provides guidance on facilitating culturally competent interactions and challenges for fieldwork educators or students. The purpose of this project was to develop a product reflecting best practices facilitating cultural competency in the student and fieldwork educator relationship.

Method A literature review was conducted to identify specific issues regarding the lack of cultural competence and awareness amongst past and current healthcare supervisors and the negative effects on the culturally diverse and international students. After reviewing the literature, the Occupational Adaptation model (Grajo, 2017) was chosen to guide the development of the product because of the basis of their concept that a person's ability to become adaptive, they will gain relative mastery in their occupational performance. Since our population specifically targets fieldwork educators and students engaged in cross cultural supervision situations, this theory guides the development of the Multicultural Supervision Tool for Occupational Therapy Level II Fieldwork Experience.

Product Based on the methodology above, we developed the Multicultural Supervision Tool for Occupational Therapy Level II Fieldwork Experience. The authors designed it to be universal discussion tool for fieldwork educators, students and the academic fieldwork coordinator to utilize during the level II fieldwork experience. The tool is equipped with a structured handout, discussion prompts and resources to assist all parties in eliciting a positive therapeutic relationship while engaged in multicultural supervision situations.

Strengths The product used a stage-based design to support fieldwork educators at various points in the process it has (a) high specificity on cross-cultural supervision relationships, (b) competent cultural sensitivity and authenticity, (c) and it is founded on occupational therapy model-based.

Limitations The literature utilized in this project were not exclusively occupational therapy-based articles. Also, this product has not been tested yet.

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