Iona College has announced that it will begin accepting applications for its new Graduate Occupational Therapy Program in the spring of 2019.

The new graduate program is waiting to be approved, with Professor Laurette Olson as its head. The program is expected to gain candidacy for accreditation in the next few weeks and to become fully accredited in the next few years.

As it goes through the candidacy process, the program will be monitored by the Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education, the accrediting agency for occupational therapy education in the United States. Once candidacy is achieved, the program can begin accepting applicants.

“If we achieve candidacy in the next few weeks, our first class will start for [the] fall in 2019,” Olson said. “So, once they start, we will write reports and ACOTE will do a campus visit to learn about whether our program is meeting the standard of occupational therapy education, and that is an important step to achieve accreditation.”

Olson has worked as an occupational therapist for 30 years and was a coordinator for an OT graduate program at Mercy College, where she helped start the program. She said she wanted to start a program at Iona because she found it to be a great opportunity to create a program from scratch in a different setting with a whole new set of resources.

“It’s a great opportunity,” Olson said. “As much as it’s hard work, you get to have a vision for a new program that you don’t if you join a program that’s already in place. So, when I was asked to come to Iona, I looked at it as a fabulous opportunity to think about who Iona was, who Iona is, and what a new OT program would look like using Iona’s strengths.”

Olson said that the program will educate its students in many practice areas of OT.

“[It will be] focusing on how people develop their occupations across their lifespan, [and] how do people who may have different cultural or ethnic backgrounds participate in their occupation,” she said. “That’s all important because an occupational therapist wants to help whoever he or she is working with to participate in ways that work for them. It’s about their life and what’s meaningful to them.”

A significant part of the program will be centered upon Iona’s value of community service by placing students into local organizations to practice OT.

“In addition, this program will use the strengths of Iona College so the program is based around community engagement and service,” Olson said. “We’ve been building connections throughout the local community both within the Iona community, as well as the local community beyond. Students will be involved throughout the curriculum in service and as they progress, they will be involved in field work experiences that are full time so that they can get experience in the field of occupational therapy under supervision. That [way,] when they graduate, they will be able to enter the field.”

The program will also feature many of Iona’s own resources, such as the Hynes Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

“We’re using the strengths of the Hynes Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation throughout the curriculum,” Olson said. “We are building activities so that OT students intentionally think about how they can be entrepreneurial and innovative in their practice because certainly, those skills are needed in healthcare. People with disabilities desperately need therapists that can think creatively and differently to help a person solve their problems of living in a way that works for that person in their life, family and community.”