ABSTRACT

Objective : The purpose of this study was to investigate attitudes of Korean occupational therapists toward introducing an accreditation system of occupational therapy education programs. Method : The self-administering written questionnaire was employed for this survey research. The questionnaire was developed and reviewed by the Accreditation Board for the Education of Korean Occupational Therapists and was composed of 18 items which included both closed-ended and open-ended questions. The questionnaire was distributed to Korean occu-pational therapists who attended at the 10th annual conference of Korean Association of Occupational Therapists in October 2002.Results : Among 106 respondents, 80.2% expressed their concern about the sudden increase of new occupational therapy education programs and they believed that the curricula of new in-stitutions and the quality of the institutes’ graduates would be different. On the question of ne-cessity of introducing the accreditation system of occupational therapy education programs, 89.7% responded that it was necessary. All respondents agreed that clinical fieldwork experience was necessary and the preferred length was 16, 24, and 12 weeks in order. The areas to be in-cluded in the accreditation were the number of qualified professors, fieldwork hours, and the contents of curricula in order. 77.4% of the sample responded that they would trust the result and process of the accreditation. Conclusion : Based on the result of the survey, it could be inferred that the majority of oc-cupational therapists were concerned about improving quality of the profession rather than its quantitative expansion. Therefore, it is expected that the accreditation system of occupational therapy education programs would ensure the qualitative growth of occupational therapy pro-fession in Korea.