Indiana Wesleyan University is proud to announce that it has received accreditation for its occupational therapy doctoral program.
The Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education (ACOTE) reviewed the on-site evaluation report regarding the Occupational Therapy Doctoral program at IWU’s Marion, Ind., campus, and ACOTE then voted this month to accredit the program for a period of seven years.
Located in Marion, on the university’s residential campus, the Doctorate of Occupational Therapy program is managed by IWU-National & Global through the IWU School of Health Sciences. The program has five full-time faculty members, one part-time faculty member and three occupational therapists who serve as adjunct faculty members.
IWU began recruiting for the Doctorate of Occupational Therapy program four years ago and currently has 59 students enrolled in three cohorts. The three-year program requires successful completion of 105 credit hours, which includes a residency project in the third year.
All classes and labs are taught in the university’s new state-of-the-art $42.8 million Ott Hall of Sciences and Nursing, which includes a lab that features a home-like setting that enables occupational therapists to learn in a real-life setting how to analyze a client’s safety and adapt the environment for a client who might need to learn new ways of handling routine daily living habits.
“Our vision with this program is to develop occupational therapists who can leave us and go on to provide compassionate and evidence-based therapy services in a world that is becoming increasingly diverse and technologically advanced,” said Doug Morris, Ph.D, OTR/L, director of the program. “The faculty in our program work hard to get to know each student and help them reach their goals as occupational therapists.”
Under guidelines established by ACOTE, new programs have a “pre-accreditation status” while they wait for the on-site evaluation, which is conducted before the first class completes the academic curriculum. Graduates of the program will be eligible to sit for their national board examination, administered by the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy (NBCOT).
The Higher Learning Commission conducted its regional accreditation visit in August 2014 and granted approval then to IWU to launch the program.