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Tweeting from #UDMH2011 a CPD opportunity for me and #OT ?

Today I attended the new University Department of Mental Health’s first conference: ‘Engagement in Life: Promoting Wellbeing in Mental Health’ and I was inspired and frustrated in equal measure. The buzzword used throughout was recovery and it was highlighted that this word often means different things to clinicians and service users. For example with anorexia nervosa, recovery is often measured by clinicians in terms of weight gain, restarting menstruation etc when for a number of service users weight gain has been and is still is associated with failure (see tweets from Ciaran Newell’s session). The service user turned peer support worker who opened discussed a plateau in recovery when without having something to do symptom relief alone is all but meaningless (my analysis). This also links to the ideas of the perils of recovery, something that is often under acknowledged which may lead to lower recovery rates. Now I’m not going to rehash everything that I heard here because I live tweeted during the conference sessions. A lone tweeter on this occasion. I used the hashtag #UDMH2011 so please search out this on twitter or a collation sire such as whatthetrend.

So, what did I find inspiring. Terry Bowyer’s eloquently presented story of his path to recovery and the fact that all of the presenters after him showed that health professionals are finally getting and acting on this message about the importance of working towards what the client sees as important and giving them hope that things will change.

But what was frustrating is that as Occupational Therapists this has been our guiding philosophy for years so why is it not us leading this debate? It was a nursing researcher colleague of mine who has worked with OTs in the past that asked in one of the concurrent sessions can the suggestions from CHIME and REFOCUS (see hashtag timeline for more detail and speaker info) not be mapped to occupational science models. Of course they can. Three elements of the REFOCUS model for example were ‘Understand Value, Assess Strengths and Support Goal Striving’. Immediately I can see that CMOP-E, MOHO, KAWA and the new to me Model of Creative Ability (http://www.otstudent.info/home/models/model-of-creative-ability) would all address this.

Take the CMOP-E (Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement) for example, which was developed alongside CPPF (Canadian Practice Process Framework) and the CMCE (Canadian Model of Client-Centred Enablement) (Turpin and Iwama, 2011). A client’s spirituality (which includes their values, beliefs, desires etc) is as the centre , the person is assessed in terms of both their deficits and strengths in relation to Affective, Cognitive and Physical Skills (along with their environment and their occupational performance in self-care, productivity and leisure activities. Goal setting is something to be agreed between client and therapist and if using the COPM tool (Canadian Occupational Performance Measure) they re framed under occupational performance headings rather than symptom related ones (Turpin and Iwama, 2011).

So the question remains, why when our theory and philosophy matches current thinking in Mental Health care are we not leading this revolution and how now can we ensure that our role is recognised and valued during the ongoing process of proposed NHS reform. Of course recovery depends on health professionals working together so we need to highlight our profession’s unique role in this process. There are no clear cut answers and I’d be interested to hear your views but here are some of my personal suggestions.
Encourage explicit implementation of occupational therapy models in practice (whichever works best for your setting or indeed each individual client). Share this with your MDT colleagues.
Research, publish and disseminate not only at OT conferences but setting related or medical or at any conferences where we can raise the profile of our profession (I need to take note of this to).
Promote, promote, promote OT, talk about it whenever you have an opportunity to anyone and everyone you meet.

As a lone tweeter did I feel I wasted my time? It’s true I got a little hand cramp and I’m not going to lie it is hard to multitask and I inevitably lost the track of the talks at times. But I have followers who aren’t OTs and hopefully something will have made its way into their consciousness whilst scanning my tweets. After all societal stigma and misunderstanding of mental health conditions is one of the challenges to recovery. But what tweeting did was make me think about what were some of the key messages and summarise these into concise 140 character tweets (minus the characters needed fir #UDMH2011). I can now go back and collect these tweets as a lasting record which is far more legible than my handwriting.

Now as the HPC audit of CPD fast approaches I would like to ask my Twitter/Blog/Facebook followers or friends a favour. If you’re not an OT I hope you didn’t find the influx of messages too annoying, can you tell me if you learnt anything or if anything struck you on reading/scanning the tweets?
If you are an OT, for a CPD activity for your own audit, either having already read the timeline for #UDMH2011 or taking the time to review it now, reflect on what you learnt or picked up that you might be able to implement in your practice, what insight it gave you to making sense of past experiences etc. Please share them with me in the comments in the blog being sure to maintain confidentiality (I moderate comments and will not approve comments that break this so no patient identifiable information). I look forward to seeing some of your responses to the key messages from the sessions I attended.

I will be live and delayed tweeting/blogging from both the College Of Occupational Therapists conference 29th/30th June/1st July and the Occupational Science Conference in Plymouth on 8th/9th September. Before these events I will put up a timetable of the sessions I am attending so you can follow my tweets on those you are interested in.
Sadly the COT session on tweeting was cancelled but if you were planning to attend session 115 and you are interested in meeting up informally please let me know.

Thanks for reading and hopefully reflecting, even if it’s only on one or two points.

Kirsty

Reference
Turpin, M. and Iwama, M. K. 2011. Using Occupational Therapy Models in Practice: a field guide. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone/ Elsevier.

Useful Resources
100 ways to support recovery http://www.mentalhealthshop.org/document.rm?id=8914
REFOCUS project http://www.researchintorecovery.com/refocus/refocusprogramme.html

Posted in Occupational Therapy

2 Comments

Tags: CPD, Mental health, Occupational Therapy, recovery, Reflection

O is for… (#atozchallenge)

Apr 19

Posted by kirstyes

O is for…

Occupational Therapy, Occupational Science and all things Occupation

I shall start with a couple of definitions:

‘Occupation: A group of activities that has personal and sociocultural meaning, is named within a culture and supports participation in society. Occupations can be categorized as self-care, productivity and/or leisure.’ (Creek, 2010 p. 25)

‘Engagement: A sense of involvement, choice, positive meaning and commitment while performing an occupation or activity.’ (Creek, 2010 p. 25)

In short then Occupational Therapists help people engage with the occupations in their lives. Additionally we can use these same occupations in our intervention plans with clients.

A fellow OT, Bridgett Piernik-Yoder, completing the a-z challenge on all things OT, posted for D on the domain of the OT and looks at what OTs do in more detail. Please check out her post here.

The British Association/College of Occupational Therapists has recently produced a range of videos showing how OTs might work with clients with a number of conditions.

Occupational Therapists could however work with anybody who is experiencing a change in their normal occupational pattern (or occupational disruption) whether they have a recognised disability or medical condition or not. Some of the potential areas I personally think OTs could work are, with new parents (what a disruption), older people entering retirement (it can be more challenging than you think having all that free time ;)) and students starting university (I know I could have done with some additional cookery and domestic skills!).

Prior to becoming a lecturer in OT I worked in physical rehabilitation, most recently with older adults following a fall or with adults of any age post stroke. I facilitated clients to work on goals as diverse as making themselves a hot drink and carrying it through to the lounge to learning how to type and send an e-mail to preparing someone to return to employment. Interventions were as varied as fabricating hand splints, taking someone shopping to work on their memory and sequencing, providing equipment at home, teaching alternative strategies, such as how to dress using one handed techniques, working on strength and balance and falls safety in a falls group and completing a work place visit to assess what demands would be placed on someone with lasting cognitive impairment.

I have to say that I loved this variety and the contact with clients and their carers and I do sometimes miss it but I really enjoy educating future practitioners too.

One of the best things about returning to academia has been revisiting the theory that underpins occupational therapy practice and really gaining an appreciation of my, and our, profession’s core underlying belief that occupational engagement can affect our health and wellbeing. It is this that has driven my topic for my PhD research. An occupational exploration of creative writing as an occupation.

Another definition for you now:

‘Occupational Science: Academic discipline of the social sciences aimed at producing a body of knowledge on occupation through theory generation, and systematic, disciplined methods of inquiry.’ (Creek, 2010, p. 29)

Everybody is now focussed on delivering evidence based interventions and occupational science aims to help provide this supporting knowledge for our profession as well as society as a whole. (Just a note that Occupational Scientists are not always OTs, but can amd should be anyone interested in the science of doing).

Personally I am not going to be looking at creative writing as therapy (at least not for for my PhD, maybe later) but I will be exploring why writers write and what that can teach us about that occupation and occupations in general.

Wish me luck.

I hope that this post has helped you understand OT a little better; it is a fantastic profession to be a part of and I really hope the value of our services are seen as vital to however health and social care ends up being structured in the UK. On my to do list is to speak to my local MP about Occupational Therapy, why not speak to yours too?

References
Creek, J., 2010. The Core Concepts of Occupational Therapy: a dynamic framework for practice. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

I would like to say the above represents my own opinions and may not reflect that of all OTs.

Any questions or comments please share below.