Happy OT Month 2020

This is OTDUDE.com’s first year celebrating OT month. We are very fortunate to be apart of this amazing community of inspiring professionals working with clients and populations across the lifespan.

This year’s motto:

Occupational Therapy: EMBRACING CHALLENGES, ENHANCING LIVES.

We will be participating in the social media’s ABCs of OT #ABCsofOT for this year’s month challenge. To up the challenge even more, we will be using action verbs to encourage all of us to take action to enhance the lives of our community.

We kicked off the first letter A with Advocacy.

Occupational therapists:

• Advocate for their profession. They educate the public about the role of occupational therapists. This includes clients. This includes other health professionals, yes – even doctors. I am sure 100% of you who at least work in the hospital have had someone mistake you for a physical therapist. We even made a badge reel as an inside joke.

  Badge Reel from OTDUDE.com Store

• Advocate for their clients. Every day. They speak up for them in IEP meetings, in huddles, with co-workers, with doctors, even other family members. OT’s play a very important role in advocating for clients because they may not have a voice or be present.

How can you take action despite the current challenge of COVID-19?

Of course, I am not recommending you go out there and set up a booth and violate your local shelter-in-place orders.

Sidenote: I must say, AOTA has really stepped up and improved their visual appearance online to raise awareness for the profession. Thumbs up to them for redesigning the logo to be more modern with the 4 colors. Their front page is also more modern and visually appealing and less overwhelming while keeping their menu system for all the sub-categories.

• Spread awareness on social media with the hashtag #otmonth.
• Check out AOTA’s post on 30 Ideas for Celebrating OT Month on Social Media
• Don the official swag or unofficial swag. We just launched some OT month badge reels for this year!

  OT Month 2020 Badge Reel from OTDUDE.com Store

• Advocate for the profession!
• AOTA also has 10 ways to promote OT:
  • Share information about occupational therapy on social media sites (5 minutes)
  • Answer questions on Q&A sites such as Quora (15 minutes)
  • Contact your legislators on Facebook (15 minutes)
  • Start pinning on Pinterest (20 minutes)
  • Take and share pictures of OT in action (time commitment varies)
  • Write a blog post about OT (30 minutes)
  • Relate a story about OT on Storify (45 minutes)
  • Record a podcast (1 hour)
  • Create a video (A couple of hours)

Happy OT Month!