Objective: Improvement in job is directly related to recognition of the experience and viewpoints of those working in the field. This research was designed to find out the job, educational and clinical experience of the occupational therapists.

Materials & Methods: This study is a qualitative research using content analysis. Data collection was done via in-depth semi -structured interviews with 15 occupational therapists working in the rehabilitation clinics in Tehran in 2009. To analyze the data, content analysis and inductive analysis were used...

Results: First, we obtained 170 key codes from data analysis .These key codes were categorized into 5 themes including ”community's attitude toward occupational therapy’s”, ”job dissatisfaction”, “a new and creative sight into occupational therapy”, “occupational therapy inappropriate educational system” and “the nature of the occupational therapy”. The themes obtained from the occupational therapists’ experience showed that how the other members of rehabilitation team, patients and patients’ family look at occupational therapy and can directly affect the occupational therapists’ job satisfaction, positive experience and sense of worth.

Conclusion: Experience of occupational therapists in their job is directly related to their patients ‘and coworkers’ ideas about their sense of worth this view passes to the occupational therapist directly and indirectly. It can affect the occupational therapists’ attitudes, satisfaction and job experience. Instructors and mentors of occupational therapy students can contribute to positive experience and satisfaction of the students from occupational therapy.

Objective: The aim of study was to design a valid and reliable tool for assessing the occupational therapists’ clinical competency.

Materials & Methods: It was a tool-making study. Many clinical competency statements were extracted from evidences and with two expert-panels helped to emerge a questionnaire with sixty-six statements in seven categories. Face and content validity were confirmed by Lawshe method. Reliability was confirmed by pilot study, test-retest and internal consistency.

Results: Occupational therapists’ clinical competency assessment tool was made with 54 questions in seven categories (critical thinking, practice process, effective communication, professional responsibilities, management of practice environment, practice knowledge, engage in professional development). Face and content validity confirmed by 15 experts CVR=0.84. Reliability (stability) was approved by pilot study, test-retest and Pierson correlation coefficient 0.995 and Cronbach’s alpha 0.973 confirmed internal consistency.

Conclusion: Appropriate tool to assess the occupational therapists’ clinical competency was made with 54 statements in seven categories. Its validity was approved by Lawshe method and reliability was approved by pilot study in 30 people.

Objective: Occupation has been used as an essential core of therapy in Occupational therapy (OT) paradigm from its beginning. Besides primary emphasis of OT pioneers the OT practitioners do not care about using it yet. So, this study was aimed to explore the current method of delivering occupational therapy services among Iranian occupational therapists.

Materials & Methods: The qualitative conventional content analysis with purposeful sampling was used in this study. 14 occupational therapists participated in this study. Semi structured interviews were used for data gathering. The data gathering continued until reaching data saturation. The interviews were analyzed through constant comparative analysis using MAXQDA 2007 software.

Results: The interviews analysis revealed 66 codes that resulted to six sub themes and three themes including: Occupation based OT (occupation based assessment and planning –hard working circumstances for occupation based therapists), technique based OT (inattention to occupation based practice- top down approach to assessment and planning-inattention to client-centered practice) and combined occupation and techniques based OT (assessment and planning with combined approach).

Conclusion: It seems that the Iranian occupational therapists have deviated from their philosophical paradigm (occupation based practice) and tended to technique based OT. Lots of possible reasons such as contextual barriers , in accepting from clients' perspective and educational challenges are considered in this issue. However, the policy makers ought to plan and supervise to solve these challenges to facilitate implementing occupation based practice.