Interview Summary

Diane Anderson has a diverse and somewhat nontraditional background in occupational therapy, including working in psychiatric care, community programs for abused children, and intervention, advocacy and research for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. She is currently the occupational therapy program director at the University of Minnesota and has held several other leadership roles in occupational therapy education.
Diane emphasizes that occupational therapy requires critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity to meet the unique needs of persons, groups and populations. She also advises anyone interested in healthcare to be prepared for the deeply personal aspects of client care.
Occupational therapists focus on how people engage in daily activities that are not just necessary but also meaningful. These activities include things such as daily self-care activities, going to school, playing sports, or work or leisure. Occupational therapists identify and address barriers that prevent individuals from completing these tasks, such as disabilities, environmental factors, and physical or mental health challenges.
To become an occupational therapist, you need either a master’s degree or a professional doctorate. Some programs follow a 3+3 model (three years undergraduate + three years graduate), while others, like the University of Minnesota, use a 4+2/3 path (four years undergraduate + two or three years graduate for a master’s or doctoral degree). There is also the role of an occupational therapy assistant, which requires either a two-year associate degree or a four-year bachelor’s degree.

Occupational Therapy Interview With Diane Anderson

How did you become interested in occupational therapy?

My father was very sick when I was a teenager, so he spent a lot of time at the Veterans Administration Hospital (VA). When I was a junior and senior in high school he was at the VA much of the time, but one weekend when he came home he told me that he’d found the perfect profession for me: occupational therapy. At the time, I wanted to join the military, but he believed I would really enjoy this career.

I researched the field, and my original goal was to become an occupational therapist at the veterans hospital so I could combine my interests in military and OT. Ultimately, I never ended up working at the veteran’s hospital, but I did end up becoming an occupational therapist and doing a lot of work in other settings.

What does occupational therapy mean to you?

Occupational therapy is concerned with all the “occupations” that someone does in a day. We don’t think of these occupations as someone’s job, but rather the activities that one needs to do each day that are meaningful, purposeful, and useful. That includes everything from getting out of bed in the morning, eating breakfast, taking care of personal hygiene, traveling to school, learning, working, playing sports, and going to bed at night. And every occupation in between.

Occupational therapy is very holistic as it pertains not just to how you physically do something but also if there is a mental, social, or cognitive factor that needs to be addressed so that a person, group or population can perform their occupations more effectively. We focus on what prevents someone from engaging in meaningful occupations, whether it’s personal limitations or environmental barriers.

For example, each semester our students go into people’s offices to set up the office so that it is the best fit for the person. The students check things in that office such as the chair height, the chair’s distance from the desk, or keyboard placement to prevent future injury. Other students might work in community settings to facilitate occupational engagement by members of the program through adapting activities, making changes to the site, or by helping persons develop new skills. Occupational therapists do both prevention and intervention to support clients.

Can you tell us about yourself?

I have had many roles, and I would consider myself a fairly nontraditional occupational therapist. This is because I haven’t worked for a substantial amount of time in nursing homes, I haven’t worked with school districts, and I haven’t worked in acute care hospital settings (settings where people usually think that occupational therapists work).

I spent most of my clinical time working in a locked psychiatric unit for teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18. These kids were suicidal, homicidal, a danger to themselves or others, or were not getting along with family or society. We conducted a lot of court-ordered evaluations of these teenagers to understand what was happening with them, and interventions to try to address their personal situations and issues. Since we were a short-term unit, we also had to determine the best placement for these kids after discharge. I spent about 11 years at that facility.

After that, I worked for a contracting agency where I set up rehab contracts for the agency. This meant that they would get a contract—typically with a nursing home or a facility that worked with adults with developmental disabilities—and I would go to the site and establish an OT department. In the process of establishing the department, I would set up the documentation, get the equipment, set up a caseload of people who needed occupational therapy, and do the evaluations for them. Once I had a full caseload, I would call the district office and say that we were ready for an occupational therapist at the site. They would then send someone to take over that site and then I would move onto the next contract. I also did quality assurance for that company by helping therapists document properly so their interventions would be covered by insurance.

Then, I went to work in South Minneapolis in the Phillips Neighborhood, an area with high crime, high levels of drug use, and high poverty rates. There, I worked in a community program for abused children, ranging in age from newborns to preschoolers. The team and I collaborated with the justice system, child protective services and other social services to help keep families together by supporting child development and teaching parents caregiving skills.

I also worked extensively with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder for about 28 years, alongside my other work. In this role, I helped to bring awareness about fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, traveled a lot as I was a national speaker, provided intervention services, offered parent support groups, trained interdisciplinary diagnostic teams, and advocated for individuals with this disorder. During that time, I returned to school to get my master’s degree in public health. Once I had my degree, I started teaching at the University of Minnesota.

I taught at the University of Minnesota for 16 years before becoming the program director of the occupational therapy program at the College of St. Scholastica. Six years later, I was asked to come down to St. Catherine University to develop their online, national occupational therapy assistant program, which I led for about six years. I then returned to the University of Minnesota, first as a teacher and then as the program director.

Full Q&A With Diane Anderson

What have you learned about yourself by being an occupational therapist?

I’ve learned that I am not as patient as I’d like to be. But I’ve also discovered that I’m a creative person and enjoy being handed problems to find solutions for. For example, when I was working in the clinic, I would be handed a problem where I had to figure out what was going on with a client and what I would do to address it. Or if I was in a community setting, I would identify barriers to member participation and problem solve ways to facilitate their performance. Now as a professor, I encounter different problems, such as when I have to figure out a way to support a student who consistently doesn’t turn in their work on time or help a student to problem solve life situations that interfere with their success in the OT Program, or support a faculty in trying a new approach to engaging students in labs.

How much education is required to be an occupational therapist?

Currently, you can become an occupational therapist with either a master’s degree or a professional doctorate. Some programs use what is called a 3+3 model, which involves three years of undergraduate study, a fourth year of undergraduate overlapping with the first year of graduate school, and then two more years of graduate school. At the University of Minnesota, we do a 4+2/3 program, where you get your undergraduate degree in four years, and you do five semesters to earn a master’s degree or seven semesters to earn a doctorate degree.

There is also the career of occupational therapy assistants, which requires either a two-year associate degree or a four-year bachelor’s degree. Occupational therapy assistants typically work under the direction of an occupational therapist.

What does a day in your life as an occupational therapist look like?

I’ve been a faculty member for over 30 years. Currently, I work at the University of Minnesota as the occupational therapy program director. In this role, I mentor younger faculty, advise and mentor students, write policy, work with student services, collaborate with administrators, advocate for the profession, and attend many meetings. Occasionally, I collaborate on research around teaching and learning, although I am not doing so right now.

Previously, I worked in the psychiatric hospital, conducted research on fetal alcohol syndrome, worked with children who were abused and neglected, and consulted with community occupational therapy. When I was in the clinic for these jobs, I would do assessments in regards to people’s capabilities and environments, provide interventions, and complete documentation. Many of my interventions involved group sessions, especially in psychiatric care. With abused and neglected children, I often co-treated them with a speech-language pathologist and also led parenting education groups for mothers.

After all of the interventions were completed, I had to document what happened and what progress has been made in order to get reimbursed for my work. Today, a lot of this documentation is done electronically. I know that occupational therapists these days who work in school settings and hospitals often have a high client load and are often documenting at bedside or in the classroom using electronic medical records. If they are in a hospital or nursing home, they may be working individually with a lot of patients every day, meaning that they do a lot of documenting for each of those patients. On the other hand, school occupational therapists tend to do more consulting in the classroom than actually working one-on-one with students. They are more often in the classroom, helping teachers understand and work with certain students to help them be successful in school. For example, they may be looking at classroom environments to identify and address barriers, or helping students who feel overwhelmed by environments at school (like the lunchroom) to self-regulate so they can do their occupations successfully.

What advice do you have for someone who is interested in the healthcare field and is trying to figure out what profession is best for them?

In healthcare, you’re not just helping people, but you are often getting dirty helping people. There are body fluids, blood, drool, excretions, wounds, and other realities of patient care. Especially in occupational therapy, you deal with deeply personal issues that people don’t normally talk about. For example, the majority of people who get injured want to be independent again, and this includes things like using the bathroom independently or resuming an active sex life. This requires occupational therapists to be able to discuss very personal matters with their patients.

Healthcare requires critical thinking, an understanding of humans and human nature, and the ability to engage with patients, groups, and populations while maintaining professional boundaries. I think that anyone considering healthcare should understand how personal you will get with the people you work with and how much you need to use your critical thinking, listening skills, creativity, and problem solving.

Can you describe a patient interaction that still resonates with you today?

As a student doing acute care field work at the University of Minnesota, I worked with a patient who had porphyria, a condition so rare that he was one of only five hundred in the United States. This particular patient had become completely paralyzed from this condition, including his breathing. By the time I saw him, he was starting to recover and attending occupational therapy.

What he wanted most was to smoke, which I did not support. But I realized that bringing a cigarette to his mouth used the same motion as bringing a spoon to his mouth, so I was able to think differently about how I approached the situation. So instead of working on smoking, I reframed the activity as working on eating independently. The whole process of bringing together what the patient wanted and what I thought he needed was the first thing that stood out to me as an occupational therapist. I think that the power of occupational therapy is the ability to problem-solve and think differently about a situation and come to a different type of understanding and solution than other healthcare professionals do. That kind of critical thinking is essential in this career, and it’s something we look for when admitting students to occupational therapy programs.