The Development of Theory- and Evidence-based Educational Workshops for Occupational Therapists

The Do-Live-Well (DLW) framework is a health promotion approach developed by Canadian occupational therapists (OTs). As the DLW framework is relatively new, it has not been widely adopted by OTs. In order to facilitate OTs to incorporate the DLW concepts in their practice, there should be more learning opportunities, and online and in-person workshops have been chosen to be a specific interest of this study. The purpose of this project was to develop theory- and evidence-based in-person and online educational workshops for OTs as a pre-implementation study to increase the knowledge of the DLW framework among OTs. In order to develop workshops, we incorporated three different phases. First, we interviewed four OTs who have been applying the DLW concepts in practice to understand their use of the framework and training needs. It was identified that OTs experienced difficulty applying the DLW concepts in practice and wanted opportunities to learn more about the DLW framework. Next, problem-based learning (PBL) guided the workshop development, and the same eight key PBL principles were incorporated in both the in-person and online workshops. Finally, four different experts completed usability testing of the online workshop website to improve its learning environment. The online workshop website was improved based on the feedback from the usability testers. The next step of this research will be to compare effectiveness of in-person and online platforms for workshop delivery. The detailed development process described in this project may assist occupational therapy educators in developing theory- and evidence-based educational delivery methods.