Weekly # 6 of 52: Goal to write one blog entry per week in 2022.
Blog post by Danny W. Pettry II, M.Ed., M.S., LPC, NCC, CTRS-BHS
Recreation Therapists are trained in the Recreation Therapy Process.
This “APIE” acronym is an easy way to remember these four skills.
The four (4) skills:
- Assess an individual’s strengths and areas of needed improvement in the following domains: social, emotional, physical, cognitive, and overall independent functioning. Sometimes “spiritual” domain is included too.
- Plan measurable goals, measurable objectives and Recreation Therapy interventions to assist the individual with meeting the goals.
- Implement the recreation therapy intervention.
- Evaluation: Did the individual reach the desired outcome? Where there goals met?
All parts of the APIE process are documented.
Think outside the box.
Recreation Therapists can use these same skills to start a business, start a consulting program or do many other things.
On starting a business:
- Assess the community: What is something that is needed? What is a need or a want that no one else is meeting?
- Plan: Get started planning out a business to meet this consumer’s demand. How can the business be funded? Are there grants? Can individuals pay out of pocket?
- Implement: Start the business to meet the community’s need.
- Evaluation? Are customer’s needs being met. What changes are needed in order to continue to be successful?
On consulting:
Create a contract with deliverables for the consultee.
These four (4) deliverables can include:
- Assess the company’s strengths and needs. Anything that can be measured and evaluated can be assessed. This could be: satisfaction, laws and regulations, growth mindset, interpersonal skills, The assessment can include: surveys; one-on-one interviews. Determine what is working well and what needs improvement. It could be a satisfaction survey. Imagine if the customers reported being unsatisfied and the employees reported being unsatisfied. Include open ended questions to learn what people are not satisfied about.
- Create an action plan for the company to meet the needs. Put it in writing. Note: the consultant is not the person to implement the recommendations. It will be the company’s responsibility to implement changes that are recommended.
- Provide a list of suggested improvements that the company can do. The consultant might even provide a training session on how to do this.
- Evaluate in a month or 6 months. Measure changes. In example: the average employee reported being satisfied at a “4”on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) in the assessment. The following actions were taken: widget action # 1; widget action # 2; and widget action # 3. The follow up survey found that employee satisfaction had doubled from a four (4) to an eight (8) one month after the implementation.
Your recreation therapy skills are valuable.
Think of ways you can use your skills outside of the Box or should I say (APIE) .
Any business (outside of Rec Therapy) would value your skills and abilities to perform the APIE process.
I just thought you might want to have a friendly reminder that you have useful skills that can be applied outside of the profession.