Meeting & Agendas

Amy welcomed and thanked all members for attending and the meeting began around 6:15 PM

• Results of the SWOT analysis – pre COVID o Students reported the strength of the program is the faculty and their fieldwork exposure. o The students discussed how beneficial the guest speakers were. Faculty has brought in more guest speakers to assist. o The college is working on the academic master which includes the opening of a community clinic.

Meeting was closed by Wendy Kushwara and seconded by Fred Alvarado

• Wendy Kushwara and Tiffany Pfluger volunteered • Wendy Kushwara was elected as the new Chair and it was seconded by Fred Alvarado • Tiffany Pfluger was elected as the new Assistant Chair and it was seconded by Wendy Kushwara

• Annual Review o The Annual review was due in February and was successfully submitted and accepted with the exception of the requirement that the Department Chair be a full-time faculty for a full year which will be remediated in August, 2021. The next Annual Review is due February 5, 2021 and all of the changes from this year will have to be documented. • On Site Visit o The next onsite visit will be in 2024/2025 o The self-study will begin in 2023 and will include 3 years of past data • Baccalaureate Programs o There are now 13 Baccalaureate Programs, in various states, none in Texas. o Texas Tech is offering a Bachelor’s of Science in Health Care Management and allow 48 transfer credits. They may accept transfer credits from the OTA program towards the 120 that are required.  They already have an articulation agreement with our EMS program. Amy will be meet with Dean Patricia Recek in the next couple weeks to begin the process for our program.

• Amy Anderson was announced as the new Department Chair • Renee Kilbride was announced as the Interim Full Time Faculty • Lauro Munoz was announced as a new Adjunct Faculty Member

• Currently at 80% for the 2nd and 3rd year students, each retaining 16/20 students. • We admitted 14 and still have all 14 students from fall 2020 • March 2020 survey of 2019 graduates revealed o Only 11 responded  3 employed full time  1 employed part time  4 PRN  3 unemployed  Evenly split between long term care and pedis with some in community placement  100% pass rate on the NBCOT on first attempt • Spoke last time about ways to gather information from employers at 6-month mark. We tried to figure out ways to get employers to send the surveys back. o This year out of the 17 sent only received 1 back o Will be working on ways to better this outcome o Have developed a new system to store the emails. Next year the data will be harder to track, had about 10 of the 2020 class graduate and have 4-5 left this year to complete the program; 3 are not going into the field until next year. o Fred questioned why students were graduating late. Amy explained that due to COVID the college closed in March and students were not allowed to begin clinicals until June. Most clinical sites were not allowing students in due to COVID as well.

• We are currently trying to align our program goals with the college goals o The college goals are:  Equity and Access  Persistence and Engagement  Completion and Transition to Employment/Transfer  Enhancing Operations and Infrastructure o The Program goals to align with the college goals are:  100% of faculty will participate in equity training provided by the college by Fall 2021 • After faculty discussion, it was decided to first educate the faculty on what equity really means and then decide how we will make our program more equitable for our students.  To promote engagement in the OT process, 90% of OTA students will participate in the SOTA club meetings and elections. • The class of 2020 had not participated in the SOTA club. • Class of 2021 got the club back up and running, assigned officers and got the constitution written. Class of 2022 got involved upon admission, totaling a 86% participation rate. • Robert Erwin discussed two projects that the club has participated in so far, resulting in their being in the top 10 for the greater Austin area for the amount raised.  Identify 3-5 traditional practice settings in ACC district. • Will keep this goal. In the past year Amy has secured 5 new sites which include inpatient rehab/outpatient dayhab, mixed pedi and adult outpatient, and outpatient pediatrics.

• We are currently carrying 3 cohorts, for which we have been given permission from ACOTE . • Currently 2 out of 12 who have completed the program have taken the NBCOT and passed. • We have had positive results in expanding to electronic documentation with 100% of students receiving a score of 3 or higher in documentation on FWPE, an increase from 2017 from 89%. We are getting better results from those fieldwork performance evaluations after instituting the electronic documentation. o Right now we are documenting in Blackboard with a rubric We are looking at expanding into more of a spreadsheet book to enable them to look at a past medical history, documentation from dietary, nursing, other therapies, etc. to help students learn how to move through a patient’s medical record and work with their teammates.  Will implement this next fall when not dealing with COVID changes. Amy asked the group for any thoughts. • Tiffany agrees that it will help the students a lot more than the way it is currently done. • Lauro offered to speak to a friend that might have some ideas or packages that can assist. He has previously spoken with her about the documentation. He will follow up and see if there may be something already built that we can use. • The other thing we are finding in the fieldwork performance evaluations is that activity analysis continues to be reported as a weakness in our level II fieldwork. It is not only recorded in our performance evaluations but in our capstone courses. Amy asked if we should substitute Activity Analysis in for Therapeutic Use of Occupation and Activity in the curricular threads or add it as another thread. o Wendy suggested adding it as another thread and wanted to know if it would be added as another task or just as another tab under a current task. Amy explained how the threads are woven into the courses. In the first year they are taught and in the second year they are re-enforced and mastered. o Tiffany believes that replacing Therapeutic Uses with Activity Analysis would be the best thing based on her work environment. o Amy reported that for the Spring semester we have expanded the Activities I course to 16 weeks and converted it to an all online course to increase the opportunities to learn how to analyze an activity.  Wendy agreed. • Since the LTC facilities have closed due to COVID, the fieldwork site availability is very tight for the program. We currently have 7 spots for spring and 16 students that need placement. While trying to figure out how to place students the main suggestion is to survey the students to see which students wouldn’t mind completing at a later date. • As of September 1st, Fieldwork Performance Evaluations have become obsolete. AOTA has put together what they call a more evidence-based performance evaluation which would cost the program, no matter how many you order, $850 a year for 5 fieldwork staff users but unlimited use for students. Right now, the fieldwork performance evaluations that we are using are $0.50 each . $850 a year for 14 students is cost prohibitive therefore Program Directors across the country are developing their own. Amy has begun to develop one for the program that she shared in the meeting. The major changes are in the category of Professional Values, Ethics and Responsibilities. Amy asked if there is anything else that should be added. o Tiffany suggest to add Insight and Lauro agreed. They want to students to know that they should ask questions and have insight to how the clinical is going.

• When we admitted the Class of 2022, they were not able to get into testing centers for TEAS testing so it was waived along with observation hours due to students not being able to get into sites to complete the hours. We brought the class of 2022 in based on the 80% GPA, 20% on the evidence-based essay they wrote. We had 52 applicants and accepted 14 students. • We are working on more Holistic approaches for the application process. We are looking to pull back from the TEAS test. Amy compared the scores from the students TEAS test to the Noel Levitz which was more predictive of attrition than the TEAS with the best predictor being the category “respect for educators “. • Due to the students being able to get back in to take the TEAS test we will be adding it back in for the 2021 application process. The applications will be scored as: o TEAS 40% o GPA 40% o Essay 20%  The essay has been altered to have the students watch a video regarding OT and reflect on what was seen in the video. • We are working with Karoline Gebert for on an online application for 2021

• In March, all courses were moved to online learning. • We changed the course offerings to 8-week courses 4 days a week. Success rates varied from class to class. Activities I has been moved to 16 weeks for spring and Patho remained16-weeks for the fall • Amy asked what the others opinions were about decreasing the Level I fieldwork hours were. Right now, we are at 96 and we are allowed between 48 and 96. o Mungu believes that if the hours are going to stay at the current length there needs to be more variety, stating there was a lot of repetition. o Tiffany expressed her hesitancy to decrease the hours. She wanted to know if it would be something that would happen for this year and then be discussed again during the next advisory board meeting or if it would be something more permanent.  Amy explains that they are finding that the stress level for the students to get the hours completed is very high.  Renee explains that according to ACOTE, Level II students have to be face to face and Level I students do not. o After discussions Tiffany agreed that it would be reasonable to decrease the hours. She also agrees that there needs to be variety.  Some suggested to survey/contact the last cohort that completed the full 96 hours and get their opinions on when they reached the point where it became too much. o Amy is suggesting changing the hours to 75 because she believes 48 would not be enough.  Pina agrees to 75-80  Pat suggest something that divides equally o They agreed on 72 hours of clinical time and 3 hours for orientation which is 75 hours.