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Sharon Glover – OTD, OTR/L – OT Faculty Profiles, USAHS
A career that began in psychiatry and moved through school-based pediatrics and nursing homes now centers on older adults for Sharon Glover, OTD, OTR/L, who teaches occupational therapy at the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences (USAHS) campus in St. Augustine, Florida. Sharon’s subspecialty is environmental modifications: how homes and communities help or hinder people doing the occupations they need.
A favorite lab brings community volunteers to campus to play older adults with specific problems, such as regaining the ability to put on a shirt after a stroke. Students pull together techniques from every earlier course to help that person succeed.
Transcript
Sharon Glover – OTD, OTR_L – OT Faculty Profiles, USAHS
[00:00:00] Sharon Glover (OT Faculty): I started my career in psychiatry, so I worked with the mental health population, and then I moved into working with children in the school system, and then I moved into working in nursing homes and with the older adults. So now I pretty much specialize with the older adults, and then a subspecialty, I guess, would be environmental modifications. I look at the environment in people’s homes and the community and how that impacts their ability to complete their occupations that they need. [00:00:28] I really love just being able to make that difference with the students and being able to have community with the other faculty to discuss ideas and ways to improve the education that we’re providing, to provide different learning opportunities, and I just love it when the students get that light bulb moment or that, like, aha of, “Oh,” all of a sudden it all makes sense again. And so I really like that piece of it, and I like having it in the classroom because when I was clinically working, I’d take students in field work and so, like, make a difference one at a time. Here, I feel like I get to make a bigger impact of a difference. [00:01:07] I’m most proud when either a client suddenly can do something that we’ve been working on and they come maybe to the therapy session and they’re like, “I put my shirt on yesterday,” and it’s like, “Oh, I feel so good now,” because we’ve been working on that for a few weeks with them. So, I really like when that happens and, or when in, during the therapy session, they do something that they’ve been working towards doing more and more. That, that enthusiasm I like. [00:01:32] I love teaching the applications. I love the hands-on part with it, teaching the students how to apply that skill that they learned in an earlier course to something else. So I have a lab where I bring some volunteers from the community. They come in as our older adults, and we give them a problem that they have, and the students have to then get that person to do something that is part of the curriculum. So maybe it’s somebody who had a stroke, and their goal is for them to be able to put their shirt on, and so the students are applying all the things they’ve learned from all their courses beforehand and all the techniques that we’ve taught them about how to put a shirt on in multiple different ways to that person for them to be successful. So I really like that because it makes the students think, and it pulls all their thoughts together, and then they do, and usually they are, like, just so thrilled that they’ve been real successful with that.
