Ot Potential Podcast

In previous courses, we’ve discussed that one of the primary ways we can improve our care, as OT professionals, is to increase the diversity of our workforce—with the ultimate goal of having our workforce’s diversity mirror the diversity of the populations we are seeing.  This goal will ensure we have the multiple perspectives needed to respond to the needs of our clients. But, until now, we’ve mostly talked about this theoretically. So, what do the actual numbers have to say about the current diversity of our workforce? It’s a mixed bag. In today’s 1 hour CEU course, we’ll look at a report from JAMA that estimates racial/ethnic representation in 10 U.S. healthcare professions.To give you a taste of the positive news: the percentage of Black OTs is better than in PT and SLP. But startlingly, the authors specifically call out OT for having a smaller percentage of Black OTs students than is in our workforce. In other words this measure of diversity showed shrinkage. There is so much to unpack from this data, an