Today marks the start of Occupational Therapy Week (3-9 November) – an opportunity to celebrate and highlight the role occupational therapy has in people’s recovery and management of their health conditions.
The purpose of this annual campaign is to share what occupational therapy is all about and why it’s so important.
Right Support, Right Time: Unlocking the Power of OT
A campaign spearheaded by the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT), the theme of this year’s campaign is ‘Right Support, Right Time: Unlocking the Power of OT’.
Occupational therapy is a vital part of the solution to today’s health, education and social care challenges. This campaign puts occupational therapy at the heart of a shift towards prevention-focused care – helping people earlier, easing pressure across services and improving outcomes.
What is occupational therapy?
Occupational therapy (OT) enables people to do the occupations they want, need and like to do, and helps them manage their health and care needs. Occupations are meaningful activities that support physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Occupational therapy saves money and reduces pressure on services and must be included in the strategic planning and allocation of resources to help manage health, education, housing and care needs in the UK.
What do occupational therapists do?
As a profession, OTs are on the frontline of health equity and are uniquely placed to understand and tackle the challenges people face. OTs see health inequalities every day, supporting and helping those most in need.
They are experts in occupations and occupational science – this means the activities that we all complete in our daily lives – ranging from specific tasks such as self-care, to those life roles that we all have.
OTs work with their patients to look at how they approach these activities and to identify the barriers preventing them from completing these tasks or roles. Taking into account both their physical and mental health, they support them to be able to do the everyday activities they need or want to do to live a healthy and fulfilling life.
Meet our occupational therapists
We have OTs working in both adult and children’s services across all our settings, not to mention our brilliant occupational therapy support staff, which includes OT Assistants and Technicians, Therapy Assistants and Therapy Practitioners.
To help demonstrate the wide range of activities and support our occupational therapists provide across the Trust, some of our fantastic OTs have produced these videos in which they speak about their roles and what they love about their jobs.
