Graduates' Reflections on their Preparation for Practice

Abstract

New graduates are the life blood of the occupational therapy profession. It is important that they are equipped to practise in the current health care environment and are confident about their professional contribution. This New Zealand study explored new graduates' perceptions of how well they had been prepared for practice, using three focus groups of graduates from one occupational therapy programme. The findings confirmed that the biggest issues for new graduates were searching for role clarity, inadequate supervision, an insufficient grasp of skills and uncertainty in team responsibility, underpinned by a lack of confidence. Conversely, they felt confident about their ability to research and find information in response to gaps in their knowledge. This study demonstrates that learning how to ‘be’ an occupational therapist is as important as receiving formal supervision, and suggests that learning how to contextualise and reconstruct knowledge is essential in preparation for graduation. The stressful situations experienced in the first months of practice could be minimised through opportunities to learn how to repackage knowledge, observe role models and have supervision that provides confirmation of plans and bridges the theory-practice divide.