Reasoning

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Photo by Helen Kabat. Used with permission Barbara Schell.

BARBARA AND JOHN SCHELL We believe it is helpful to understand a bit about the people behind books such as this one. Here are brief narratives of our experiences for you to gain a glimpse of our personal and professional selves.

SHAPING PRACTICE: BARBARA’S PURSUIT OF PROMOTING EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE

Barbara first began to explicitly explore clinical reasoning when she was an occu pational therapy manager at Harmarville Rehabilitation Center in Pittsburgh, PA. In that capacity, she had oversight of a large department, including over 30 oc cupational therapy personnel, along with other related professionals and support staff. When she first came to Harmarville, there was a great deal of work aimed at focusing departmental efforts and developing systems to support staff in the deliv ery of services (Schell & Braveman, 2005). This was during the 1980s, when there was an extreme shortage of personnel and significant turbulence in healthcare as funding mechanisms began to shift from retrospective to prospective systems. During this same period, Joan Rogers made clinical reasoning the subject of her Eleanor Clark Slagle Lecture (1984) and, in the latter part of the decade, the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) and the American Occupa tional Therapy Association (AOTA) funded the research project, which came to be known as the Clinical Reasoning Study (Mattingly & Fleming, 1994). In order to progress the department’s practices and to support her leadership of this process, Barbara wrote a grant to bring in Wendy Wood (fresh from her master’s coursework at the University of Southern California) as a consultant to assist the department

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