Therapist Assistant - THER 140 - Recreation Therapy Assistant: Principles & Practice I

Today, we will lay the foundation for how you will locate health sciences information to use for your education and professional careers. 

Why is this skill meaningful to you?

1. Effective information research skills will help you identify knowledge and shape your approach to clinical practice, reinforcing the goals of your area of practice and enhancing patient care.

2. This session will help you transition from primarily consuming health sciences information to contributing to it.

3. The volume of scholarly information produced in the health sciences is 'mind blogging'. Its size is increasing exponentially.

The four cornerstones of a profession are specialized knowledge, autonomy, authority, and altruism. One primary source of such specialized knowledge is peer-reviewed journals. The first official occupational therapy-specific journal, "Archives of Occupational Therapy," was published in 1922 by the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA).

In a 2021 article titled "Keeping up with the medical literature: Why, how, and when?" The authors reported on a search they conducted in PubMed in 2020 for articles containing the keyword 'Stroke'; they found over 30,000 articles. This result was 2.3× higher than in 2010 and 5× higher than in 2000.  For better or worse heal sciences information is growing at an exponential growth rate. 

You need to develop effective and efficient information-seeking and evaluation skills to survive in this information environment. These skills should help you seek out and use new ideas to benefit your practice, patients, and community. 

Luckily, the health science has one of the most well-developed approaches to conducting research and evaluating information. 

Today we are going to introduce you to the growing array of information resources that you need to be aware of and begin your learning process about how to search for, evaluate and cite such information