Meeting & Agendas

Estrella opened the meeting and thanked everyone for attending. Estrella also announced the former chair, Ponce Vielma has moved and a new chair is needed. Fred Alvarado has agreed to be the new committee chair.

Estrella would be pleased to get suggestions. Please e-mail her. Estrella mentioned wanting to do more Fieldwork Educator for CI training workshops.

Question was raised about how we are teaching documentation. Currently we are using paper but looking at methods that can be done on the ipad. Ann mentioned teaching how to take SOAP notes to CPT billing notes. Chris mentioned that students didn't know how to bill or value their time or how to get the highest value. This is discussed in the management class. But don't have a way to do documentation codes from SOAP notes. Marcia mentioned that we do this in the elder class and one of the lab activities. Pat mentioned working with the Health Information Technology program on this topic. Pat also mentioned collaborating with nursing and PTA program on some electronic health record software. Chris mentioned that professional boundaries can't be emphasized enough. Examples that were mentioned were GoFundMe and Facebook between client and student. Estrella said that they try to integrate this in the curriculum. They still have some students who don't see this as inappropriate and the program will continue to update policies as things come up concerning social media. The professional expectations thread is found throughout the curriculum and they are pretty strict about enforcement during classtime. Amy also mentioned that social media is now part of the Code of Ethics that students have t learn.

One last item brought up by Pat was that the division was looking at tattoo and piercing guidelines based on other hospital policies. Meeting was adjourned at 7:24 p.m.

Estrella announced that thanks to everyone's help, a 10 year accreditation was achieved during the visit earlier in the semester. Estrella also mentioned that she is looking to the future and the next leaders that will be there around for the next visit.

We have consistently met our goals. The only one with some concerns are surrounding the admission of students into the program. This is actually an area that the entire college is focused on and on how we are supporting program progression. Using the DAC to look at courses and threads and to see where we are not meeting student needs. We recently revised student learning outcomes as a result of this. We are very optimistic that we can track outcomes and intervene earlier if students are struggling. We will be excited to report our data a year from now. Another big help to students will be the hiring of our program tutor. Amy Anderson has been hired as an instructional associate. We will be a little more intrusive with directing students to tutoring when we see them struggling. Amy brought up that more are volunteering to come as opposed to mandated. Another resource that is needed is for students that struggle with the English language. Estrella asked how that is handled in the worksite. Fred mentioned that he is called frequently to translate for Spanish speaking patients. They also keep an English/Spanish dictionary on hand to help. There is also a tool called American Speech Sounds to get pronunciation help. Several other tools were mentioned by members. Marcie mentioned that she thought it was good to have Google translate on the ipads. Pat Recek mentioned a recent Austin American Statesman article about the number of languages spoken in the Austin area. She also mentioned that the learning labs are very open to helping our students. Another accomplishment that we are proud to announce is the acquisition of 20 ipads and Exam Soft software to support computerized testing. We hope that this will lead to increased student success. There is a large learning curve in using these but the NBCOT certification exam is now online. We started using these in Fall 2015. It has allowed us to tag questions to curriculum threads. We have created banks of questions based on curricular threads and we can track performance and monitor and give good feedback to both the instructor and students. It is also hoped that this will help us write better test questions to explore what we really want the student to know and make sure the content is taught to the depth that we want and need. Amy provided a brief overview of this and mentioned a little about how it worked for students and how the analysis was reported.

Estrella reported that 70% of the students that started in the cohort ended up graduating on time. (14/20). We lost 4 students in the first three weeks of the semester. This had never happened in the history of the program. None of the reasons were for academic preparedness but instead dealt with students' personal lives. The program is looking for ways to see what we can do differently. We are also tracking all information from the exit interviews to look for trends. The program would love to have any suggestions for ideas to get the message to prospective students. We currently bring grads to the information sessions and orientations. A suggestion was made to have the applicants audit a class to see what it is like. Possibly also get time in class with a current student. This would be difficult with the classes that are taught in the summer. Another consideration is extending the orientation ot a full day and encourage students to think about if it would work for them to be in the program. There was a lengthy discussion on graduation rates and the program is looking for strategies to help make it more interactive. Estrella shared some of the statistics on the current pool of applicants and stated that for now the program would stay with 20 students per class due to the difficulties of admitting more than that.

Estrella presented the new degree plan to be implemented in 2015-16. She also outlined the changes to the admission criteria and talked about some of the reasons including the time limits for certain prerequisite courses. The program has also added the TEAS V exam as an objective way to screen students. TEAS is a nationally used tool. Estrella provided information on the TEAS and will track if this test changes what our students look like and will share more data next year. Michelle mentioned that she was aware of at least one PTA applicant who did not apply due to TEAS requirements.

This continues to be successful and positive with the rotations that students make. It gives a broad set of experiences in the OT setting and it seems to be very popular. This is the fifth year to do this in Spring 2016. Estrella mentioned that the summer psychosocial is a lot of fun and she mentioned that they were able to expand to the YMCA and Dell. They had a summer day camp with sports activities and the students loved this non-traditional setting. We hope to continue participating in this. Another program that students participated in was the Steps Program with ACC students that have mild disabilities. Students saw and experienced the transition that the students in high school made to the college world. They partnered with teachers in the program. This program targets basic entry level professional skills, computer skills and social skills.

Thankfully no changes this year.