OT Potential Podcast | Occupational Therapy CEUs

In the United States, therapy professionals are mostly educated in silos.
So it’s no wonder that when we get into the real world, we often struggle with interprofessional collaboration.
The answer is simple, and medicine, nursing, and pharmacy have already embraced it: interprofessional education.
But if this is the way forward, why has therapy been slow to adopt it? Will we lose our distinct value if we learn alongside other professions? Does it actually work, and if so, how do we measure that? And what does it look like in practice?
To answer these questions and more, I’m excited to welcome to the podcast Michael Sy, an OT researcher who writes and studies on exactly this topic.
We hope this conversation inspires you to think about how you collaborate across professions, and to see that it can begin with learning together.
See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/interprofessional-education
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At the heart of rehab therapy is often behavior change. That powerful lever is how therapy is able to deliver such long-term, life-altering results.
But let's be honest—it's also hard.
I know I, for one, have sat in a therapy office as a patient, pledging to do my home exercise program, and then totally failed to do it.
Motivational interviewing is an evidence-based approach that helps us get at the "why" behind what makes behavior change so difficult. It surfaces the real challenges so the therapist and patient can work through them together—and it gives us five specific skills to use in that process.
In today's one-hour course, we're joined by Sabina Kahn, PhD, EdD, OTD, MS, OTR/L. Sabina literally wrote the book on motivational interviewing for OT, PT, and SLP. Today, she'll share what she's learned, role-play MI in action, and help you start putting this process to work in your own practice.
See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/motivational-interviewing
See all OT CEU courses here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education

Check our our live webinar schedule here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/live-webinars

Support the show by using the OTPOTENTIAL Medbridge Code:
https://otpotential.com/blog/promo-code-for-medbridge

Try 2 free OT Potential courses here:
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As we've covered on the podcast, the world is heading toward a dementia crisis. The number of people living with dementia is projected to nearly triple by 2050, and low- and middle-income countries will be hit hardest.
But there is real hope for changing that trajectory: prevention.
The 2024 Lancet Commission estimates that nearly half of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors, including hearing loss, hypertension, physical inactivity, and social isolation. And our guest's research points to something striking: nearly half of individual differences in Alzheimer's risk may be attributable to environmental influences, and his own study found that walkability, green space, and light pollution were linked to cognitive performance regardless of biomarker status.
In this course, we'll talk with Ganesh Babulal, PhD, OTD, MSCI, MOT, OTR/L, FAOTA, about addressing those risk factors, recognizing cognitive decline early, and whether early intervention can slow, or in some cases even reverse, decline.
We'll close with a vision for a team approach to care, where public data on environmental risk is synced into the EMR, physicians recognize risk earlier, and a therapy referral helps mitigate that risk before problems arise.
See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/risk-factors-for-cognitive-decline
See all OT CEU courses here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education

Check our our live webinar schedule here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/live-webinars

Support the show by using the OTPOTENTIAL Medbridge Code:
https://otpotential.com/blog/promo-code-for-medbridge

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More than 2.4 billion people around the globe live with a health condition that would benefit from rehabilitation, and more than 1 billion are living with a mental health condition. But how do they find the right therapist among the roughly 2.8 million OTs and PTs out there, not to mention SLPs and mental health professionals?
The answer is pretty obvious: marketing.
But in our busy clinical lives, we tend to overlook the importance of this business activity. And we certainly don't spend enough time thinking about how it could drive better outcomes. We know that therapeutic alliance is one of the main drivers of therapy outcomes. Yet we rarely think of marketing as the first step in helping a patient find the therapist who is right for them.
Luckily, there's some fascinating research out there to help us think about this overlooked therapy activity.
And I'm excited to welcome to the podcast Erica Stevens, MOTR/L, CLT, CHC, CYT, owner of Thrive OT. Erica built her practice from square one, selling a niche of therapy that really made her get clear about who it's for and what the benefits are.
Financial Disclosure: OT Potential is a Jane App affiliate and receives a commission when listeners purchase Jane App with our Jane App promo code: Potential. Jane App comes up in this course because our speaker uses it to run her practice. Jane App had no role in the content of this course. This relationship is also disclosed in the episode.
See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/marketing-your-therapy-practice
See all OT CEU courses here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education

Check our our live webinar schedule here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/live-webinars

Support the show by using the OTPOTENTIAL Medbridge Code:
https://otpotential.com/blog/promo-code-for-medbridge

Try 2 free OT Potential courses here:
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For as long as I've been an OT, I've been hearing about occupational therapy's advocacy to be recognized as behavioral health providers.
This is frankly a little confusing, since OT has deep roots in mental health care — and many of us became OTs because of the unique way the profession holistically considers mental health and physical health, and how the two intersect in everyday function.
Things honestly become even more confusing when you start to dig into what exactly it means to be recognized as a behavioral health provider. What doors does that open to us? What is the current patchwork of states — and what is our desired future?
There is no better person to help us speak to these questions than Halley Read. Halley is the lead author on "Occupational Therapy: A Potential Solution to the Behavioral Health Workforce Shortage," published in Psychiatric Services in 2024.
Which gets at exactly the right question: why are we limiting the mental health workforce, when mental health workers are so desperately needed?
This course is intended for OTs, to help us understand this situation — but also for our fellow members of the healthcare team, to understand what OT can contribute and what policy changes would let us work in our full scope.
See full course details here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/ot-as-mental-health-providers 
See all OT CEU courses here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education

Check our our live webinar schedule here:
https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/live-webinars

Support the show by using the OTPOTENTIAL Medbridge Code:
https://otpotential.com/blog/promo-code-for-medbridge

Try 2 free OT Potential courses here:
https://otpotential.com/free-ot-ceus
Support the show