Celebrating the work of our OTs during the COVID-19 pandemic
During OT week, we're celebrating the work of Occupational Therapists and how they've continued to change people's lives throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sarah Jane is the Practice manager of the Home Assessment Team.
This is a relatively new team, with staff of different skills and disciplines who work closely together to help patients being discharged from hospital. She says, “People think of occupational therapy as relating to jobs, but actually it’s more helpful to see it as supporting those activities which ‘occupy’ us in our daily lives ; this could be anything from getting out of bed comfortably, getting the children to school on time, or walking the dog. In essence, it is what is meaningful to a person both functionally and for our wellbeing”
The team of Occupational Therapists, social workers and social care assessors put the patient at the centre of their assessment, finding out what they want to achieve along their journey to maximise independence, and ultimately, help them get back to the function they had before being admitted to hospital. They are flexible in their approach; each assessment being tailored to what the person needs, where and when they need it.
Key to the approach is finding out what really matters to the individual being assessed. To many of us outside of the world of social care it’s easy to assume that the most important activity to resume would be personal care or being able to have a bath again independently. However, it may be the case for a green-fingered individual that getting back out into their garden will create a sense of well-being and achievement that will aid their recovery even faster.
There is no waiting list; everyone is seen within set time scales from when they leave hospital. For Sarah Jane, this is key to getting the best outcomes, “Seeing people at the earliest opportunity means they gain the most benefit from hands-on physical and therapeutic intervention from the outset that will hopefully lead a them to be less reliant on having to adapt their physical and social environment in the longer-term.”
The team works closely with the reablement service and has seen some real successes: some people have gone from having assistance at home from two carers four times a day, to complete independence within six weeks. By having a team of professionals from different areas of health and social care they are able to give people the right help at the right time in the right place for them rather than stick to fixed, ‘standard’ criteria.
Sarah Jane continued, “Cases can often move between staff on the team depending on what the patient needs and when – we have no fixed boundaries in the team or staff who say, ‘no that’s not my area’. We will always take a joint approach. It’s been so exciting to see how staff are approaching assessments differently once they have some experience of working in a multi-disciplinary team.”
By and large the team have been able to keep up with demand for their services since the COVID-19 pandemic although the need for rapid discharge from hospitals has meant patients are often very fragile and in an earlier stage of their recovery than they might previously have been. But Sarah Jane says the difficulties caused by local restrictions should make us all think twice. “Lockdown gave us all a taste of what it can be like to lose some of the liberties we take for granted. It has changed our ‘occupations’ – those hobbies, interests and daily activities that help give meaning to our lives and has given many of us a tiny insight into the traumas that people can go through when they can’t do what they used to. As a wise person once said about our profession, ‘a physiotherapist can teach you how to walk again, but an OT will teach you how to dance’.”