Meet Vanessa

Vanessa is in her third week of fieldwork in a busy, fast-paced outpatient rehab department of a large teaching hospital. For the first week, she and her CI debriefed between sessions and had a scheduled end-of-week meeting to discuss her goals. That weekend, Vanessa got engaged and wore her ring to fieldwork the next day but continued to focus her time and attention on patient care. Since then, Vanessa’s CI has mentioned her engagement multiple times a day, talking about the size of her ring, commenting that she doesn’t think it is a good idea to get engaged during fieldwork, and saying that Vanessa probably won’t work as an OT once she gets married. Vanessa re-directs the conversation to patient sessions or other professional matters but her CI does not change the subject. Vanessa is afraid she is not getting the information to increase her caseload and improve her clinical skills. She is also uncomfortable with her CI’s focus on her personal life and dreads interacting with her. Since changing the subject has not worked for Vanessa, she has decided to talk with her CI in this week’s meeting about how she feels.