How to be a better OT

Introductions, logistics and what "better" actually means

• Clare Batkin - Your OT Tutor • Season 1

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Want to become a more confident, competent occupational therapist but don't know exactly where to focus your learning and professional development?

Episode Summary: In this debut episode of the How to Be a Better OT podcast, host and "Your OT Tutor" founder Clare Batkin introduces her mission to make professional development simple, practical, and worth it for OTs. Clare shares her 17-year journey through diverse clinical settings and unveils her signature framework: The Foundations of OT Success. Whether you are a student, a new grad, or an experienced clinician, this podcast will help you develop the core skills you need to excel and love what you do.


Key Takeaways:

  • Meet Your Host: Learn about Clare's diverse 17-year OT career, spanning from acute ICU to community NDIS, and how her passion for clinical education led to the creation of Your OT Tutor.
  • The Foundations of OT Success: A high-level breakdown of the core skills every OT needs, from "Thinking like an OT" and "Being an OT Detective," to solving problems that change lives.
  • The Missing Link in OT Education: Discover why Foundation 1, "Empower Yourself," is the crucial first step for providing the energy and brain space needed for developing as an OT.
  • A Sneak Peek at the Podcast: Find out what to expect in Series 1 ("How-To" guides for core OT skills) and Series 2 (Clare’s take on hot topics in the OT world).

 

Links & Resources Mentioned:

If you found this introduction helpful, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a fellow OT who wants to grow in their career! 


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Welcome to the How to Be a Better OT podcast. I'm Claire Batkin, an OT and clinical educator who is on a mission to make professional development simple, practical, and worth it for OTs. If you're ready to step back from the overwhelm and bring core frameworks to life, join me for step-by-step guides and practical solutions that will build your confidence and competence so you can deliver the best outcomes for your clients and truly love what you do. Hi, and welcome to episode zero of the How to Be a Better OT podcast. I'm your host, Clare Batkin, and in this short introductory episode, I just wanted to take 10 or 15 minutes to introduce myself, explain what this podcast is all about, and how I'll be releasing the episodes, so you can decide if it's going to be helpful for you before diving into one of the big episodes. For those of you who don't know me, I'm the founder and solopreneur behind Your OT Tutor. So you may have already come across some of my online courses, or you've maybe seen some of my posts or comments on social media, or you may even be a member of one of my CPD memberships. Whether you know me already or you're just discovering Your OT Tutor for the first time via this podcast, thanks so much for taking the time to listen. Now, I wanted to start off with a bit of background about who I am, because I figure if you're going to spend minutes or hours listening to me talk, you'll want to know what my OT experience is and where I'm coming from. Now, at the time of recording this in June 2026, I've been an OT for 17 years. I've worked in public hospitals and the private sector across a range of different case loads and settings. This includes aged care, neuro, burns, hand therapy, rehab, acute medical and surgical case loads, and even ICU. The bulk of my work has been with adults with physical conditions, but also some work with people with psychosocial conditions in community settings since moving to the private sector and NDIS work in 2021. Now, one thing that I've always loved about my OT roles, and if I'm honest, probably even more than the clinical client work within some of my roles, is the education side of being an OT. So I've loved supervising students, running in-services for my OT department, and I've also been working as a sessional academic at a university for nearly a decade, too. I've loved it so much that in 2022, I decided to make it my main focus. But the only way that I could do this and have control over how I did it was to launch my own business, which I did, and so Your OT Tutor was born. Now, the business started with some content on social media, especially LinkedIn, and the hot tip is that if you'd like to see some of my free stuff in the form of daily posts, connect with me on LinkedIn and sign up to my newsletters there. So I've got over 18,000 followers and more than 10,000 newsletter subscribers, so hopefully, you'll find something valuable worth tuning in there for, too. I'm also currently one of the early content creators sharing educational content on a brand-new social media platform exclusively for allied health called Echo. And I'll drop some links for where you can find me on those platforms in the show notes. Your OT Tutor has been growing steadily in terms of content over the past few years, and I now offer a range of on-demand courses, online CPD memberships, a journal club, team training, and one-to-one supervision and mentoring. Now, while the content has grown, the Your OT Tutor team hasn't. I'm still proudly a solopreneur, but it's not just me you're learning from. Instead, I take part in lots of collaborations. So I've built courses with other OTs, I've run successful free webinars with other OTs, and I've built a free resource library with over 100 different resources for OTs and allied health professionals, which features not just my work, but it showcases some great resources from other allied health educators and service providers too. Now, despite pumping out a lot of content over the past few years, there's been a couple of things that have been on my to-do list for a while, and one of them is to release this podcast. But that day has finally arrived, so what is the How to Be a Better OT podcast all about? Firstly, I want to explain the name, and to do that, I'll need to rewind a little and tell you a little bit more about my take on what's important in OT clinical education. After working across a range of OT settings and supporting students, new grads, and experienced OTs to not only learn in those settings but to excel, I found that there are certain foundational skills that apply across all caseloads, and if OTs can prioritise developing these skills, you'll be able to find roles where you're competent, you feel confident, and you'll really love what you do. So when I was trying to give what I taught OTs a bit of structure, I developed a framework called the Foundations of OT Success, and it covers eight different foundations, which I'll run you through quickly now. I'm going to skip foundation one, though, and come back to that at the end. But foundation two is think like an OT. So this is all about remembering those OT models and frameworks that we learnt at uni and knowing that they can still be really helpful once you're working. They can give you some direction and clarity for your clinical reasoning. Foundation three is be an OT nerd, and this is all about recognising the importance of evidence-based practice and having some basic skills in things like reading and interpreting research evidence and knowing how to apply it in the real world. Number four is connect and collaborate, which is all about having effective relationships with the people we work with. So not just our clients and their families, but other health professionals and stakeholders too. Foundation number five is to be an OT detective, and I'll admit this is probably one of my favourite ones to teach. So this is all about developing skills in effective information gathering. So things like how to plan and analyse the results of functional observations, how to interview effectively, conduct home assessments, and how to use standardised assessments in a meaningful way. Foundation six is a favourite of all the OTs who love the doing part of OT, so actually getting in and working with our clients, and it's called solve problems, change lives, because that's what we're hoping to do. We want to use our OT brain to come up with solutions that are life-changing. So whether that's through assistive technology prescription, ADL retraining, providing targeted education, or even just writing a really good report that will help someone access life-changing supports. The final two foundations are often more for the experienced OTs, but many students and early career clinicians can still start to develop these skills, too. So Foundation Seven is Teach and Transform, which covers topics like student supervision, which is another favorite of mine, running education sessions for your own team or a wider audience, and provision of effective supervision and mentoring. And then number eight is Raise the Bar. So this is where we go beyond that day-to-day clinical work to have a bigger impact, whether that's through building a positive social media profile, joining committees and advocacy movements, presenting at conferences, or doing quality improvement or research activities. And now, I said I'd come back to Foundation One, and the reason I wanted to cover it last is because you'll find that it's very difficult to make progress on any of those other foundational skills unless you spend some time on Foundation One. So really, all the other ones could be worked on in isolation, but I'd always recommend that you start with Foundation One, which is called Empower Yourself. So this foundation is about being really clear on what your own values are and that you choose a role and employer that will align with that. It's about developing professional and organizational skills, such as time management and caseload management, as well as self-development, including having some ideas for the direction you'd like your career to head or at least some planned out CPD goals for the next few months in front of you. And it's about getting the balance right with building resilience to cope in often complex and challenging settings, while also prioritizing self-care that works for your individual needs. Now, if these are areas that you feel you're struggling with now, it's gonna be much harder to have the headspace and the energy to work on all those other foundations that I mentioned. So don't skip over this foundation when trying to plan where to focus your learning efforts. Now, the whole aim of this framework is to help you become a better OT who loves what you do. But there's no definitive meaning for the word better when I use it here or in the podcast title. So better could be better in terms of feeling more aligned with the work that you deliver, or better could be feeling like you're making positive progress forward in your own growth and forever learning and developing. Not that you're necessarily better than other OTs around you. Better basically means just having that growth mindset, and this is what will help us to find the work that we love to do. So all the work that I do falls under one of these foundations. All the courses will draw on some of these skills. My memberships are set up with these foundations as the overarching structure, and my plan is that this podcast will also help to reinforce each of these foundational skills in different ways in different episodes. So if you think this could be a helpful approach for your own development as an OT, then I think you'll find this podcast useful. But before you start listening, another thing that you might like to do is to take my free self-reflection quiz, where it will guide you to think about how you're currently performing on each of these foundational skills to help you identify where your priorities for future learning might be. So I'll drop the link to that in the show notes. But now just to finish off this episode, a bit of logistical info for you. As I mentioned before, Your OT Tutor is a solopreneur business, and I've got lots of projects happening all the time. I also wear lots of other hats, working as a sessional academic. I do some casual work for a clinical business here in Brisbane, and I do some volunteering in not-for-profit and charity organisations where they have a focus on education initiatives for allied health. I'm also a mum to two primary school-aged kids, and I'm admin support for my husband's plumbing business, which basically just means life is busy. So rather than commit to a weekly episode for the foreseeable future, I'll be releasing the podcast in series. So each series will probably be about ten episodes long, and it will have a particular theme. Within this, each episode will be about twenty to thirty-five minutes long, so you can easily fit them into short windows within your day. And for those who want more information on the topic, I'll point you in the direction of other freebies and resources where you'll be able to do a deeper dive. The first two series have already been mapped out, so the first is focused on how-to guides for OT. Each episode will focus on a particular OT service or process, and I'll walk you through the key things that you need to know in a step-by-step way, unpacking the clinical reasoning behind the decisions we make as we go through. Now, some of the topics already planned are how to do an hospital initial assessment, how to do a functional capacity assessment, home assessments, client education, and assistive technology prescription. Series two will be about my perspectives on different hot topics impacting the OT world. And if you've ever followed along my Clare's Thoughts newsletter on LinkedIn or checked out some of my blogs on my website, you'll be able to get a bit of a preview of some of the topics that I might be covering here. So it includes topics like how to justify your clinical recommendations, um, overcoming barriers to follow-up, working effectively in a multidisciplinary team, even when everyone is busy, and an episode with new grads in mind with tips for doing well at the start of your career. So hopefully those topics sound interesting to you because I'm really excited to keep pulling them all together for you. My goal is that this podcast will provide another way for OTs to make learning a more prominent part of your life. So not just an afterthought or even a chore that feels like something you need to tick off rather than something you're looking forward to. My goal with Your OT Tutor is to produce professional development that's simple, practical, and worth it, so this podcast seemed to be the next logical step to achieve that. Thanks for sticking around to the end of this episode zero of the podcast, and I hope you enjoy the episodes that you do go ahead and check out, whether you're just dropping in and out intermittently or you become a regular listener. If you do enjoy the podcast, please spread the word to other OTs or OT students who you think could like it, too, and leave me some feedback or reviews so that I know whether or not this content is hitting the mark. Thanks again, and good luck on your own journey to becoming a better OT who loves what you do. The information shared on this podcast is for general educational use only, so please always use your own clinical reasoning and seek appropriate professional supervision for any individual client situations. If you'd like to learn more with Your OT Tutor so that you can be a better OT who loves what you do, check out the Your OT Tutor website. The links will be in the show notes. There are free resources in the learning library, paid CPD memberships, online courses, supervision and mentoring opportunities, and options for your team to all learn together with me.