Author: Erin Wilson
From a young age, occupational therapy (OT) student Hailey Molloy knew she wanted to help people, though she wasn’t yet sure how. Her first exposure to OT was young, when her teenage cousin was involved in a severe car accident, resulting in a traumatic brain injury that was expected to end her life. Her cousin spent nearly 120 days in the hospital receiving intensive therapy after forgetting everything about her life.
“She had to relearn how to do everything,” Molloy said. “My family, at that point, saw the impact that occupational therapy has because she had to relearn how to clothe herself, how to brush her teeth, how to feed herself, communicate with others, and handle the behavioral changes that were going on in her life due to the brain injury. That's when I first learned about occupational therapy.”
It was in middle school that Molloy realized she wanted to work with veterans and older adults. She loved the stories they had to share and considered them “living pieces of history.” Part of that came from her grandfather, a history buff who told her the stories behind his collection of memorabilia whenever Molloy and her family traveled from their home in rural North Carolina to visit family in Minnesota. Molloy was also interested in the World War I origins of OT, when it was established for wounded and traumatized soldiers. Her hope is to work at a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital after she graduates and perhaps conduct research on the benefits of occupational therapy for veterans.
“I've really learned that there's a lack of evidence backing specific occupation-based interventions … I have a specific interest in substance use, recovery, and addiction, and that is a really common issue within the veteran population, along with suicide and homelessness,” Molloy said. “All of them kind of overlap, due to the trauma [veterans] experience and the things that they bring back with them from the war, both physically and mentally.”
Molloy’s capstone project will involve qualitative research on this population, using photo voice methodology to allow veterans to self-advocate. She said many veterans express dissatisfaction with the VA system and claim it doesn’t fulfill their true needs. Molloy is determined to practice OT to its most holistic extent, caring for individual patients by learning what matters to them and using that to improve their quality of life.
“Sometimes it's just as simple as feeling like they're heard, rather than needing to be put on higher levels of antidepressants, etcetera,” Molloy said. “Part of my project is still going to look at pre- and post-testing, but I think the lived experience, client satisfaction, and perceptions of whether or not it was helpful are equally as important because they are the ones who know what they need most.”
Molloy’s undergraduate degree was in recreational therapy, which she thinks prepared her well for the creative and holistic approaches it shares with OT.
“I think it helped a lot in regard to creativity,” Molloy said. “Sometimes when you're trying to cater an intervention to a specific individual, there's parts of it that are unchanging because they need to work on range of motion, or whatever the skill might be, but in order to make it fit better and engage the person, there needs to be those creative aspects that are centered around their interests.”
Though she originally wanted to attend the University of Minnesota for her undergraduate degree, she decided to stay in her home state of North Carolina to save money for graduate school. She was drawn to Minnesota not only because of family, but because she thought the college’s program could give her an edge— it offered a doctorate degree, rather than solely a masters, which could set her apart.
“I wanted to come to Minnesota for so long and it always felt like a second home for me, but it also has one of the oldest programs in the nation for occupational therapy,” Molloy said. “I was still participating in interviews and hearing back from schools when I heard that I got the spot here … This is what my goal was, to get into this program and move up here and go to OT school.”