About Me

As for my experience in creating the CBR program, I was assigned with the Education component wherein our program entitled, “Play to Cope, Learn to Hope”, was mostly focused on helping the children in the center to manage symptoms, achieve a sense of fulfillment and increased quality of life through the use of play activities. We started off through gathering our baseline data through conducting a survey that each member of the group has a role filled in. I was able to help with summarizing the survey data and presented it to the entire class once we gathered responses. This was helpful in allowing us to analyze which areas do the families of the center have trouble completing, thus, we were able to design a program that fits the needs of the families when we were given the chance to analyze their concerns, and so we came up with giving them activities through play such as the balloon activity, t-shirt designing, and stress ball making to help not only with self-confidence and creativity, but also learn how to manage signs of stress. Everyone in the group had their own roles to play, and I was able to help specifically in creating the program’s vision, mission, and objectives, as well as help in making the powerpoint presentation the day prior to the actual program. We were also asked to pay an amount to help cover the fees that were needed to purchase all the materials that were going to be used by the participants. Our group has been nothing but cooperative and worked well together, and it was a great experience to be able to not only learn from my classmates, but also see the fruits of our hard work. This definitely wasn’t an easy task to complete especially considering that we had to design, plan, and implement the program through online means, while only a selected few could actually go to the center for the face to face facilitation. Despite the challenges, we were all able to do each role given to us, and our programs were actually quite successful.

Personally, the biggest thing that I learned from this program implementation was that occupational therapy is really a very versatile and flexible profession that basically applies to any type of health-related problems that a certain group of people may have. Despite OT being a lesser-known health discipline, it still has a pretty wide range of applications and strong female founders. Being an Occupational Therapist allows you to make real changes to people's lives and is a highly purposeful and creative profession to be in. An OT aims to reduce the impact of injury or disability on the day to day functioning of that person in the areas of work, leisure, social, domestic and personal activity. It is an integrated approach that looks at mental, emotional and physical impact on function. What we did in this program has allowed the children to not only experience the activities given, but also allowing them to make their own choices through providing them with needed information that they need to make these choices. Not only is OT versatile and utilizes many types of skills, these skills are applied to improving lives, providing clients with even greater satisfaction and overall quality of life. I do hope that the families that participated in the program were able to learn something from what we’ve provided, and continue to apply that in the future whenever they’re met with challenges in creating the best life for their children.