Two current UND occupational therapy students learn how their moms also graduated from UND\u2019s OT program together three decades ago.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s amazing what a Christmas card can do.<\/p>\n
Visiting her parents at her childhood home in Mapleton, N.D., over the holiday break last year, third-year occupational therapy student Olivia Dobrinz was looking through the greeting cards that her mother Lia had posted on the farmhouse\u2019s front foyer.<\/p>\n
Then Olivia froze.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like, \u2018What\u2019s my friend Sydney doing in this card?\u2019\u201d Olivia recalled with a laugh, turning to smile at her mother. \u201cI said, \u2018Mom, I take classes with her.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s Darla Johnson\u2019s daughter Sydney,\u2019\u201d Lia replied. \u201cDarla and I trained together at UND. So I asked \u2018Is Sydney in OT too?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Sure enough, Sydney Johnson was \u2013 and is \u2013 an occupational therapy doctorate (OTD) student alongside Olivia at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences in Grand Forks. And, yes, the two students\u2019 mothers \u2013 Darla Johnson and Lia Dobrinz \u2013 were also OT classmates at UND in the 1990s.<\/p>\n
After a few excited \u2013 and amazed \u2013 texts and emails, the four current and future OTs had figured it out: Despite starting in physical therapy, Olivia had switched her major to OT in her first year at UND. Soon thereafter she learned that she was on the same floor of the same residence hall as Sydney \u2013 whom Olivia had started noticing in her pre-OT classes. And both trainees had, as Sydney put it, spent their childhoods \u201clearning about OT\u201d from their moms.<\/p>\n
Small world, indeed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would go to my mom\u2019s office work parties and play in the sensory gym at her facility,\u201d remembered Sydney, who is in the middle of a pediatric outpatient fieldwork placement at the Altru Health System Performance Center in Grand Forks. \u201cSo I decided to go to UND. Olivia was actually roommates with someone I knew from high school, so we all became friends.\u201d<\/p>\n
Years earlier, Elk River, Minn., native Darla had met Fargo-Moorhead native and former pre-med student Lia at UND around 1989. Back then, UND\u2019s Department of Occupational Therapy, which celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2024, offered \u201cjust\u201d a Bachelor of Science degree in OT, which both Lia and Darla took home in 1993. (UND replaced its BSOT degree with a Master of Occupational Therapy degree in 2000 and the MOT with an OTD degree in 2019.)<\/p>\n
After graduation, Darla ended up back in south-central Minnesota and Lia ended up back on the North Dakota side of the Red River Valley. Both are still practicing in the profession: at Sanford Health in Fargo and Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, Minn., respectively.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d grown up with a friend who had a spinal cord injury, and it was neat to see how independent he was and lived a completely normal life,\u201d Lia said of her decision to explore OT as a college student. \u201cI kind of found my niche in that area, I guess \u2013 growing up with this friend. I wouldn\u2019t have known that he was paralyzed from the waist down. He worked every day, drove, did everything independently. It was a cool, inspirational thing, and I was able to see how impactful OT could be in a lot of ways for a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
That impact has only grown since the 1990s. As Darla explained, the expansion of OT across the therapeutic spectrum this century means that she and her colleagues are a much larger piece of the patient care puzzle than they were when UND\u2019s OT program was founded in 1954.<\/p>\n
Of this there is no better example than autism diagnoses.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the big changes in the field and probably in our culture is the change with autism diagnosis,\u201d said Darla. \u201cWe had very minimal training in the 1990s \u2013 just a brief touch on sensory integration. For my very first job, I saw one person with a diagnosis of autism. Right now, autism accounts for 80% of the kids who walk through the door in our clinic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitting alongside her mother, Sydney nodded, explaining how central autism training is to the current OTD curriculum.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, classroom and fieldwork,\u201d Sydney added. \u201cI learned a lot of those sensory things with autism early. And I\u2019m assuming that even in your fieldwork training you didn\u2019t have that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also missing from her educational experience a quarter century ago was feeding intervention, Darla continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s often a comorbidity of autism and feeding difficulties,\u201d she said. \u201cFeeding aversion and picky eating with limited diets. I see many of those kids, and also see kids with feeding difficulties who were born prematurely and have a G-tube placement. I see them when they\u2019re around two years old, and we work on getting them to eat orally. Those kids born prematurely didn\u2019t survive at 25 weeks in 1994. That\u2019s a huge change.\u201d<\/p>\n
What has also likely changed since Lia and Darla graduated, said Olivia, is the amount of research and evidence-based intervention training ongoing in OT programs, UND\u2019s included.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was more of a psychiatric component at that time at UND,\u201d added Lia. \u201cThat\u2019s a very important component of what we do, but I appreciate that it\u2019s gotten away from that a bit, allowing you to explore other avenues to get in more neuro-physical disability training as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
These changes in OT education \u2013 which follow changes in both research and clinical practice, noted both Darla and Lia \u2013 have meant a greater acceptance of the profession today, relative to 70 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a more respected profession,\u201d quipped Lia. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more collaboration and working with the other providers to have the best outcome in the rehab setting \u2013 the team approach. That\u2019s what we\u2019re realizing as health systems, and even with insurance companies. The new norm is helping keep our clients as independent as we can. We were at the cutting edge of that as OTs. That concept has exploded and really shined a positive light on our profession. It\u2019s very collaborative now, and I appreciate that.\u201d<\/p>\n
This shift in the culture of health systems, never mind society at large, means Lia and Darla both had to deal with challenges that their daughters could hardly image today. That\u2019s exactly why it\u2019s sometimes difficult for the moms to step back and let their daughters learn the profession their own way.<\/p>\n
But not too difficult.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not really that hard,\u201d shrugged Sydney of having an OT mom while she\u2019s in an OT training program. \u201cWe talk about what assessments we like. I ask her if they use certain assessments at her clinic and then if there were some that she\u2019d never heard about. But I had minimal education on feeding interventions coming into my fieldwork, so I was able to ask my mom a lot of different questions about different interventions and what to look for and different things to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSydney does a good job of saying \u2018Okay, Mom, I got it. I\u2019m learning all of this in school,\u2019\u201d acknowledged Darla, who along with Lia keeps up with advances in OT through continuing education programs. \u201cShe does a good job of setting boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lia agreed, adding that having a daughter in OT now helps her learn more of what\u2019s current in the profession.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a fine line, because you want to allow them the opportunity to experience this themselves and grow and learn from it, and not just constantly be whispering in their ear,\u201d admitted Lia, who works with UND OT students at Sanford and has lectured at UND to discuss occupational therapy and driving rehabilitation. \u201cIt\u2019s been exciting for me as a mom to watch that happen. I try to not offer feedback unless she reaches out for it, and I\u2019m learning from her as well, because the field is constantly evolving.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because the profession continues to evolve, both daughters expect to specialize in fields different from those of their mothers. Sydney hopes to end up in pediatric therapy in the nature-based setting (the focus of her senior capstone project), or perhaps pursue travel OT.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would like to experience new things, places, settings and then probably end up somewhere around Minnesota,\u201d she said. \u201cOr maybe even practice in a rural setting. Wyoming or Montana would be cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
And instead of focusing on driving interventions for adults like her mom, Olivia expects to explore orthopedics or pediatrics in an urban setting, to \u201csee where that takes me.\u201d<\/p>\n
For their part, both Lia and Darla are still satisfied with the training they received at UND, and the current state of UND\u2019s OT program, which they get to absorb \u2013 30 years after their own graduation \u2013 through their children.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been fun to see the UND program I love grow, especially now that it\u2019s included in the med school and that interprofessional paradigm,\u201d Lia mused. \u201cBack when Darla and I went to school, we were in the old Hyslop building, above the pool. Everyone in class would be like, \u2018Why does my head hurt?\u2019 It was the chlorine. So, it\u2019s been neat to see the wonderful environment there now, and the beautiful facility. It\u2019s awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe used to hang out together both in and outside of the classroom,\u201d added Darla of her and Lia\u2019s UND experience. \u201cWe spent Halloweens together and did the dress-up thing with the department. It was fun. And I\u2019m glad to hear that hasn\u2019t changed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or if it has changed seventy years into its run, the moms imply, UND\u2019s Department of Occupational Therapy has only gotten better with age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two current UND occupational therapy students learn how their moms also graduated from UND\u2019s OT program together three decades ago. It\u2019s amazing what a Christmas card can do. Visiting her parents at her childhood home in Mapleton, N.D., over the holiday break last year, third-year occupational therapy student Olivia Dobrinz was looking through the greeting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":12403,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3199,473,3198,1451,341],"class_list":["post-12376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-daughter","tag-family","tag-mom","tag-occupational-therapy","tag-ot"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n