The purpose of the Doctoral Experiential is for students to apply the knowledge and skills gained during their OTD academic courses and their Level I and II fieldwork experiences in ways that challenge and perhaps transform the delivery of health, educational, and social services. Through designing and implementing a community experiential and a scholarly project that specifically responds to the needs of a population and setting, students experience the roles of a reflective practitioner, a transformative leader, and an innovative designer. The Doctoral Experiential is a complex interrelated field experience and scholarly project that is coordinated by a student, university and community team.

The WNE OTD Doctoral Experiential has two components. One, a community experiential, involves completing 14 weeks, or 560 hours at a community organization. Community organizations include hospitals, clinics, schools, health care, social service, advocacy, or educational organizations. While there, students will learn about the population and setting, the organization’s strengths and challenges, and will participate in daily activities. While there, they will also conduct a scholarly project designed to answer a question generated from a needs assessment, literature review, and collaboration with faculty, site, and peer mentors. The intention of both the community experiential and the scholarly project is to establish a meaningful connection between University and community, to improve health, education, and social services, and to explore potentially transformative roles for occupational therapists.

The specific roles and responsibilities of the OTD student during the community experiential and the scholarly project are determined via an ongoing collaborative planning process and documented in a Doctoral Experiential Proposal. All student plans and activities must be within the limits of the practice act for their state. As OTD students will not have completed their professional educational program by the time they begin the community experiential and the scholarly project, they are not yet able to practice occupational therapy independently. Appropriate supervision and mentorship are built into the planning and implementation processes. Through this experiential form of education, students are expected to learn about themselves and their community, imagine and innovate in response to identified need, understand organizational development and function, and apply the skills and knowledge gained in the academic and fieldwork components of the OTD program (Western New England University, 2020).

Occupational therapists and caregivers of children affiliated with Springfield Public Schools (SPS) and Behavioral Health Network (BNH) early intervention (EI) services are experiencing unusually high stress due to the rapid transition to an online format of care delivery due to COVID-19. This transition has led to feelings of heightened stress, exacerbated by a lack of available resources on developmental play, emotional and mental health, and community resources accessibility. The unexpected change in structured routine has caused many individuals to seek developmentally appropriate activities to do at home with their children, but with time as a limited resource, both caregivers and therapists are strained to fulfill their daily occupations on top of these newly added responsibilities. This has created a need for occupational therapy doctorate (OTD) students to provide educational and intervention resources as consultants for BHN early intervention services and Springfield Public Schools.

The purpose of this project is to provide resources, in the form of handouts, activities, and infographics, to Lisa Pasternak and Megan Hopper for their personal and professional use, as well as to distribute to their colleagues and the families of their clients, in order to reduce the stress in these key players and provide ample developmentally appropriate activities and information to support continued therapeutic development of their clients while in the home setting.