Group Therapy: The WHAT, the WHY, and the HOW to Create an Impactful Group Therapy Treatment

Course Description

This course teaches physical, occupational, and speech therapists the benefits of group therapy and why they should choose this type of therapy to improve their patients’ outcomes. The education consists of providing the researched-based evidence on the benefits of group interactions, dual tasking, Systems Theory of Movement, healthy lifestyle strategies as it relates to the health of the brain and body and how it affects the quality of movement and function.

Educational theories are presented to assist the therapists in learning how to communicate and teach their patients. Videos of working in groups are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the therapeutic activities, exercise, safety, balance, activity tolerance, ADL’s, and other treatment techniques that apply to rehabilitation.

There is an emphasis on integrating sensory stimulation, therapeutic exercise, healthy lifestyle strategies, therapeutic activities, and face-to-face interactions to challenge each patient to reach their maximal function.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course, the participant will be able to:

• Describe the evidence-based benefits of group therapy
• Utilize dual tasking and the theories of dynamic motor control, neurogenesis and neuroplasticity for optimal results during group therapy.
• Apply the educational theories of multiple intelligence and experiential learning in a group therapy session in order to improve communication and teaching skills.
• Describe how implementation of healthy lifestyle strategies will assist patients in more fully benefiting from therapeutic interventions.
• Create a group therapy treatment session that challenges each individual patient to work toward their individual goals of muscle strength, balance, functional mobility, activity tolerance, posture, gait skills, ADL’s, IADL’s, speech and language skills, and specialized skills.

• Prerequisites

  None

• Educational Level

  Intermediate

• Other

  Satisfactory completion of this course will require the participant to complete a 10 question post-test with a minimum passing score of 70%.