Teaching Evidence-based Practice to Occupational Therapy Students during Psychiatry Fieldwork: A Curriculum at a University Hospital in Taiwan

Abstract

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has received more and more attention in the healthcare system in the past decades. Occupational therapy faculty and fieldwork supervisors have been facing greater challenges in transmitting the concepts and style of EBP to future therapists. This paper describes the curriculum design of a university hospital in Taiwan employing EBP for occupational therapy students during their fieldwork rotation in psychiatry. The fieldwork EBP curriculum was carried out during the weekly journal meetings throughout the 13-week psychiatry rotation, with collaboration between occupational therapy faculty and clinical supervisors. Feedback from intern students at the end of their fieldwork rotation is provided in this paper, and this feedback indicated that the teaching model provided them with the opportunity to integrate research evidence into actual practice. Several issues are discussed in the latter part of this paper, including EBP as a platform of collaboration between academic faculty and clinical supervisors, fieldwork practice as an ideal stage of habit training for EBP, and EBP as a medium of increasing professional identity in mental health practice among young occupational therapists.

Keywords:

• Fieldwork education
• professionalization
• evidence-based occupational therapy
• professional identity