Sunday, November 23, 2014

What can Malaysian occupational therapists contribute to occupational therapy knowledge internationally?

I think with our high percentage of Muslim occupational therapists, society where religion stills plays a very important role in our everyday lives, and reasonably good skills in English (we're not perfect, but we do have a higher level of English skills than many other Asian countries), Malaysian occupational therapists actually have the opportunity to play a very important role in the development of culturally relevant occupational therapy for Muslims around the world.

With Islam as the second largest world religion, but with most occupational therapy interventions more slanted towards the Western way of living, we can see that occupational therapy that is compliant with the Muslim way of life is quite under-served and there is much that Malaysian occupational therapists can contribute in the development of this area, not just in developing interventions, but also in terms of educating non-Muslim occupational therapists around the world who have Muslim clients to serve.

Personally, I am not a Muslim occupational therapist. I'm actually Buddhist. But I am spearheading some efforts to develop culturally relevant occupational therapy for Chinese communities (alongside occupational therapist colleagues from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and of course - Malaysia). With 500, 000, 000 (500 million! Wow!) overseas Chinese and 1.35 billion people living inside China itself (20% of the world's population!), all sharing a common ethnic, cultural background with daily living practices very much unique to their Confucian culture, the dominance of Western-based occupational therapy practice (and subsequent lack of culturally relevant occupational therapy for this population) means large numbers of people unable to benefit fully from what occupational therapy has to offer.

If we don't do something about this issue, who would we expect to take on the responsibility? This is the same question I ask people when they ask me why I choose to remain in this country to develop the occupational therapy profession when I could very easily get a job elsewhere - if not me, who else?

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