Level: Intermediate
Intended Audience: Occupational therapists, speech language pathologists, physical therapists, special education teachers, psychologists, early intervention specialists, nurses, physicians, mental health providers and parents
Prerequisite: None
Summary: Funded by the Ohio Department of Education, Every Moment Counts is a mental health promotion initiative designed to help all children and youth become mentally healthy in order to succeed in school, at home and in the community. This session will describe how a multi-tiered public health approach is used to provide a range of occupational therapy services and supports to meet the mental health needs of children and youth with and without disabilities and mental health challenges. Model programs and intervention strategies designed to be embedded during classroom, cafeteria, recess and after-school will be shared.
Presenter: Susan Bazyk, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA is a Professor in the Occupational Therapy Program at Cleveland State University where she has taught for the past 30 years. She is also director of the Graduate Certificate Program in School-Based Practice. Throughout her career, she has specialized in occupational therapy practice with children and youth in home, school and community-based settings. Dr. Bazyk is the editor of a recently published book entitled Mental health promotion, prevention, and intervention with children and youth: A guiding framework for occupational therapy (2011) and the 2013 AOTA Practice Guideline on the same topic. In 2012, she was awarded a large 3 year grant from the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), Office of Exceptional Children (OEC) entitled Every Moment Counts: Promoting Children’s Mental Health Throughout the Day. This 3-year project focuses on building capacity of occupational therapists and interdisciplinary school teams in addressing the mental health needs of all students throughout the day including lunch, recess and extracurricular after-school activities.
Carol Siefert Conway, MS, OTR/L is a pediatric occupational therapist with 33 years experience, specializing in school-based practice. In her current position at Hudson City Schools, she serves on the school leadership team and has been instrumental in successfully shifting OT service provision from an outdated pull-out model to an integrated model, thus maximizing the impact of OT at a whole-school level. Carol has specialized knowledge and skills in the areas of sensory processing, social and emotional learning (SEL), positive behavioral interventions & supports (PBIS), peer mediated interventions and co-teaching strategies. She is on the leadership team for the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) funded grant initiative, Every Moment Counts: Promoting Mental Health Throughout the Day, and had contributed to the development and implementation of several model programs emphasizing integrated services.
Learning Objectives:
- Demonstrate an understanding of how to apply a multi-tiered, public health approach to mental health in OT practice with children and youth. Understand the research movement away from clinical based disorders to genetic and neural network based dimensions of cognitive processing.
- Describe the implementation and outcomes of OT model programs integrated throughout the school day (classroom, cafeteria, recess, after-school), emphasizing participation and enjoyment.
- Describe how OTs can address the sensory processing needs of students in academic and non-academic settings using informal and formal integrated services.