Georgia Occupational Therapy Association

The Research Partnership Committee members are as follows:  Irma Alvarado, Lynn Jaffe, Hollie Hendershot, and Ricky Joseph (no longer a member due to Army commitment). At the Strategic Planning session in February, the following goals were set for our committee:

1. GOTA to provide a resource list of OT professionals to participate in research projects to be posted on the website
2. GOTA to provide a resource list of current research projects / activities to be posted on the website.

In efforts to achieve these goals, Lynn Jaffe surveyed the membership in order to gather information about needs regarding clinical research. She requested responses by February 1 2008 and we only received 4 responses. There was no active interest in a Saturday Mini workshops at Brenau University on March 29, 2008 or at a Wi Fi site such as Panera Bread Café.

Other topics related to Research were:

• Searching for evidence/literature and forming questions
• Setting up a study
• Statistics for the math-challenged
• Overcoming Writer's Block

Irma Alvarado and Lynn Jaffe invite GOTA membership/districts to participate in any capacity possible to either report District activity related to conducting/considering conducting research, research ideas and study sites for OT/OTA program faculty and students to consider for theses, research projects or applied research, program evaluation, or instrument development and revision. Study groups that meet on a regular basis to discuss Evidence Based Practice are also invited to share your meeting dates/sites and resources. No project is too small!

We invite the membership to step up and be a resource or identify resources for GOTA members in order to develop the Research Resource List to be posted on the GOTA website. We also welcome any members to this committee. We can share information via Google Docs or Blog that Dr. Lynn Jaffe, created after GOTA conference last October, 2007.

Thank You,

Irma Alvarado, Ph.D, OTR/L