Communication Problems
Making use of less highly trained assistants posed serious problems of communication for professional people, said Dr S. W. P. Mirams, director of the Division of Mental Health. He told the Occupational Therapists’ Association conference at Lincoln College that highly trained professional people often feared the consequences of passing their special knowledge on to their assistants.
They asked themselves, “Am I training someone to replace me?” and such fears could get in the way of training assistants to be of maximum use.
Their defence, said Dr Mirams, was to retreat into obscurantism, jargon and deliberate mystification. “This is a problem for your profession and a major problem for my own specialty,” he said.
Communications were of crucial importance to occupational therapists. He warned of the danger of being caught up with the fascination of subtleties of language and failing to realise that mostly what people said was actually what they meant.
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Bibliographic details
Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31994, 22 May 1969, Page 16
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153Communication Problems Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31994, 22 May 1969, Page 16
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