Nutrition Guest Speaker Blog

The key takeaway point from the guest lecture today is the importance of protein. Many individuals in the hospital do not eat enough food, especially protein, and it causes them to lose lean body mass and become weaker and frail. Clients need to be educated on the importance of eating enough, especially while they are in the hospital. My grandfather was in the hospital this summer and I went to visit him one day. While I was there, he was served his lunch and my grandfather immediately turned it away, stating that he did not want to eat anything. My grandma tried to get him to eat something, but he refused. I knew that his goal was to get discharged from Acute care and go to an inpatient rehab room. I told him that he was going to need to tolerate 3 hours of therapy a day at the inpatient rehab and that he really needed to eat to get his strength and energy back. His eyes lit up because he had no idea that it would require that and no one had told him about the importance of eating in the hospital. After today, I would have told him how important the protein was especially. This shows how important it is to inform and educate the clients so they know how their eating would affect their recovery.

One intervention is a group cooking class in an assisted living home. It can help the residents socialize and enjoy cooking, while the OT will educate them on the importance of their diet.

Another intervention is educating an individual in acute care about how their diet can assist with their recovery and help them regain the strength needed to be discharged, as well as the importance of continuing the healthy diet after discharge to continue the recovery.  

Glyph Reflection

I was surprised to see how different my Glyph drawing was from the beginning of OT school. The aspects that were different were the: head shape, eye size, hat, eyelashes, and written name. The head shape was the most surprising to me, because I did not even second guess how I felt about it this time and thought for sure that it would be the same as last time. I think that leadership can be influenced by both nature and nurture, but I think more people have the natural ability to lead a group and that it is harder to work at it. One my first glyph drawing, I drew large eyes, but this time I drew small eyes. After over a year and a half of OT school, I definitely think that OT is made up of a bunch of leaders, but I do not think that the vast majority would classify as leaders. I added a hat this time because I believe that my approach to leadership has changed since starting OT school. We have learned so many different ways that someone can be a leader in OT that I would not have thought about in the beginning, such as being a leader with your client. Setting an example for them on how to view therapy and the sessions with you is a way you can influence someone without being in a "typical" leadership role. While the typical leadership roles are out there in OT, we have definitely learned new ways as well. I knew that the eyelashes were going to change when I read the prompt because I could not come up with the Strengthfinder themes but I knew that I would have known them at the time of the first drawing.
The aspects that stayed the same were: glasses, curly hair, smile, ears, nose, freckles, eyebrows, and necklace/accessory. I was not surprised by any of these, because I felt pretty confident in my opinion on each of them. This was a cool assignment that I honestly forgot we did in the beginning; it really feels like a life time ago that we started school. I was very interested to see how some of my opinions changed and how some of them stayed the same.