Viewpoints of the Occupational Therapist Assistant–Physiotherapist Assistant Role on Inter-Professional Teams: A Mixed-Methods Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Occupational therapist assistants and physiotherapist assistants work on inter-professional teams in both institutional and community settings to facilitate patients’ rehabilitation and recovery. Examination of how the assistant role is viewed by assistants and other inter-professional team members is needed to inform how to support and sustain development of the role and associated practice relationships. Method: In this explanatory sequential-design mixed-methods study, we first surveyed rehabilitation personnel, then held focus groups at a large urban health care organization. Statistical and thematic analysis was conducted to combine the findings from both data sources. Results: A total of 89 therapists and assistants completed surveys; 30 also contributed to four focus groups. Five themes were developed that expressed the perceptions of the assistant role on inter-professional teams: (1) left out of the loop, (2) living in the grey: negotiating and navigating the assistant role, (3) who’s the boss? (4) things just don’t fall into your lap: pursuing professional development, and (5) (not) just the assistant: the influence of norms and attitudes and external perspectives. Conclusions: The findings describe perceptions and institutional norms of the assistant practice role. They can inform discussions on regulation and accreditation as well as professional and continuing education, and they can promote reflection on team dynamics and supervisory practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".