Practising reflection: a medical humanities approach to occupational therapist education

Abstract

The importance of active learning, re¯ective practice and continuing professional development (CPD) for health professionals is well established in the literature.What is open to question is how these goals are achieved; how re¯ective practice can be individualized and sustained; how constraints of time and cost can be overcome. It has been suggested that medical humanities, using literature in health professional education, achieves the desired goals. This paper describes the authors' experiences of medical humanities in order to show how it can provide reflective education, by giving health professionals opportunities to re¯ect on their practice and on themselves as practitioners.The focus on one discipline, Occupational Therapy, shows how medical humanities can be integrated in the career life-cycle of health professionals, creating pathways for lifelong learning.

An International Systematic Mapping Review of Educational Approaches and Teaching Methods in Occupational Therapy

“…It was defined as promoting connections across different domains and contexts of learning. For example, papers addressed the integration of theory and practice (Johansson and Björklund 2005), education and research and practice (Javaherian and Scheerer 2007), skills and reflection (Murray et al 2000), cognitive knowledge and emotion (Peloquin 2002), basic sciences and clinical applications (Liotta-Kleinfeld and McPhee 2001), curriculum and teaching approaches (Chapman et al 2006), research evidence and client perspectives (Ciaravino 2006), diagnostic information and client perspectives (Cooper and Spencer-Dawe 2006), ethics and context (Dieruf 2004), curriculum and the community (Hansen et al 2007), and threads integrated across a curriculum (Forwell et al 2001).…”