I promised excitement....

Now for the overwhelming part I promised: The guest speaker for the ASD tonight was……..



drum roll, please…….




……Gary Kielhofner, DrPH, OTR/L, FAOTA (CV).  As in Dr. Kielhofner the man who edited our Research textbook; Dr. Kielhofner, who was a major developer of the MOHO (Model of Human Occupation); The Dr. Kielhofner (As if all of the letters behind his name didn’t tell you he was important)! 

Not only is he a big wig (in his own words, one of those who sits in the ivory tower doing research), his ideas of combining research and practice are inspiring.  His novel (or not so novel) ideas are for researchers to do the research for the practitioners.  Through this collaboration, researchers will be able to meet the need for relevant evidence, or the evidence based practice (EBP) that the clinicians/practitioners need to support their “real world” work.  Dr. Kielhofner further defines relevant evidence by stating that it includes: clinical (expert knowledge), clients’ perspectives, applied research studies, and basic studies that contribute to the understanding of a particular phenomenon.   Only from the true blend of “real world OT” and the “ivory research tower” will relevant research take place.  He even gave a shout out to Dr. Jean Ayres, praising her and noting that she always had one foot in practice (working as a clinician and serving clients throughout her professional life) and one foot in research.

We learned about the MOHO last semester, but what we read in our text only scrapes the bottom of the barrel.  There is so much more-- theory, research, evidence based assessments, evidence based treatments, and the MOHO list goes on.  There are around 500 scholarly articles or chapters that have been published regarding the MOHO. 

I encourage you all to take a look at the MOHO Clearinghouse. http://www.moho.uic.edu/  I look forward to sharing more about the website in the future.  It will be very helpful when doing research in grad school, but it will also be an excellent source when you are a practitioner in the “real world”.