1 Although it would have been desirable to follow up interviews carried out by other research teams and organizations to reflect a wider range of approaches, data protection requirements would have made access to a sample and the approach process much more problematic.
A survey of 136 Australian occupational therapists explored their perception of their autonomy and status, through questions concerning role definition; peer network and peer review; professional association and industrial affiliation; skills and procedures characteristic of the profession; views on others' perception of their role; credentials to practise; salary and years of practice. The authors conclude that the profession has a high opinion of its status and autonomy, a belief that it has a unique set of skills (though not aims), and adequate credentials to practise. They also suggest, however, that there is reason to question the extent to which this professional self‐image is well founded.
A group of Melbourne based occupational therapy educators and clinicians question the need for a paradigm for occupational therapy. They claim that professional status is more dependent upon expert organization (formal and informal) of the profession and its external relations than on conceptual and theoretical consensus. Identification of the state‐of‐the‐art of occupational therapy is held to be an important first step in the move towards better organization and relations with other health professions. Occupational therapists Australia‐wide are asked to assist in the identification process.
to a considerable growth in demand for occupational therapists. The main reserve labour force consists of women caring for dependent children, many of whom would welcome the opportunity to return to work if their needs for flexible hours and on-site child care were catered for. Whilst the changes in patterns of employment and career attitudes could be interpreted as indicators of a decrease in labour-force problems, the profession's continued acceptance of traditional working conditions suggests that problems may be perpetuated rather than alleviated.
If health services are to move towards being the people services that the community wants and expects, then there is need for major changes to take place in the way in which health services are planned, managed and delivered. A key factor in achieving that change is to engender the types of attitudes in our health professional students that will allow them to act in a partnership role with the coinmunity and individuals to determine their needs and listen to their expertise. By building bridges to the community that allows people in the community to have input and responsibility for health professional education we can epitomise and imprint the type of relationships that we say are important, but often do not exempli&. This contribution describes the process by which a medical undergraduate course has obtained input from the community into its student training, and the programmes that have developed as a result of this partnership. The major thrust, however, is an examination of the reasons why such a partnership should be built and the principles that allow genuine partnership, and therefore progress, to have been achieved.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.