Question
What is the sandwich message when giving meaningful feedback in OT practice?
Answer
The sandwich method is used if you have sensitive or negative comments, or you need to give critical feedback. Those are for the situations where you are having more of a formal interaction. I use this method a lot when I am talking to parents about overall progress in therapy, or with my students when I am trying to give them more of an understanding of where they are in their fieldwork.
In contrast, when you are talking about meaningful feedback, this is informal feedback. It might not have any kind of negative component. Everyone has probably written a paper in their life where they got a grade back with just a number. You might think, "Okay, I don't know what I did that was so great in this paper. There's no feedback to guide me." Even if you got 99 or 100, you still may want to know if it was well written, your ideas were very clearly stated, or the organization was extremely effective. Without that, it is hard to know where to go in the future.
Let's say you have a client that is working on a toilet transfer. They are just doing such a phenomenal job that you really do not have anything critical to say, but you do not want to just say, "You're doing a great job." Instead, you might say, "Your transfer was extremely safe because of the way that you were facing the grab bar, the way that you moved your feet, and you made sure that the walker was out of the way. I like that you did it slowly and carefully." Now that person has specific feedback moving forward. If you just said, "Good job," they might be okay, but they might not really know that they were moving slowly. Next time they might go a little faster, and it might not be such a good job. That is the difference.
The sandwich method is a little bit more, "Hey, this was positive, but then we need to talk a little bit more about a sensitive subject, and then I'm going to end up with something positive again."
