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Well, we've launched two main reports the first one was looking at the role of
occupational therapists in supporting people either not to go into hospital in
the first place if it can be avoided but also if people did end up having to be
admitted into hospital, improving their flow their journey through the hospital
and ensuring that transition back into the community is done smoothly as
quickly as possible but also making sure that it's the right set up for when
people go home so that they don't come back into hospital what we want is, you
know, a one-off journey and that they remain in their communities so
that report was launched in November 2016 and then we followed it with Living
Not Existing where we particularly looked at older people and how best to
support them to remain in their communities.
Yes, well we launched nationally right across the UK so into all four
nations and we've been talking to policy leads talking to politicians assembly
members in Wales for example and then we've been also having conversations
with people that commission services and manage services highlighting you know
the role of occupational therapy in terms of supporting patients journey
through hospital and also how we support people to stay connected to their
communities and as independent as possible in their homes. So we've had
a lot of interest in the work that occupational therapists are doing with
ambulance services going out and doing force response with paramedics we came
up with one example and that's now rolled out and we're getting contacted
by other services that have either piloted or commissioned a similar
service. Fire and rescue service again it's going in and into people's homes at a
very early level a very early stage and delivering some public health messaging
and advising people on how to prevent having falls how to stay safe in their
home occupational therapists are working with fire officers giving them advice
and training on how best to approach people with for instance dementia
complex long term conditions frailty injury mental health and those
partnerships are very successful we're talking to the National Fire Chiefs
Council about how we can strengthen those partnerships and ensure they're
rolled out right across the UK
Well 2018 we're really trying to connect with members I think most members have
heard of the campaign though we still go out and and find people have heard of
it really don't know much detail about it what we want to do is help them to
understand what they can do locally where their power is when they can lead
and influence it's not just a Royal College of occupational therapists thing
that happens at a national level it needs to be happening right across the
country so we want to communicate with members and explain to
them what they can do and what we can do to support
we've got over 32,000 members
they've got much more influence than than we can possibly have so we will
keep on knocking on doors and having those conversations at a at a strategic
top level but we need members to go and talk to the public talk to their
commissioners and managers and talk to their colleagues and explain confidently
this is what occupational therapy can offer
There is limited resources out
there I think most members would have experienced restructuring, scrutiny of
their service we have to explain what we can offer the public and what our
role is so we've got to be really clear and articulate what we do we have to be
really clear about what is our unique selling point what do we bring into the
multidisciplinary team that the other team members can't do and then we need
to say what are the outcomes then for people that use this service how are
they going to benefit from having contact with occupational therapy?
And our three key messages are that we need to be deployed at an earlier stage
if people are going to learn to self-manage their long-term conditions
then there is little point in doing that when they're at crisis stage where
they're really ill, we need to be getting in there much earlier
so that we can reduce the impact of ending up in secondary services and
A&E for instance. The second thing is that we are a limited resource which we
need to be sharing our expertise so we've got some work in partnership and I
think occupational therapist we've worked in housing Health social care
education we can act the catalyst of working across sectors we need to think
about how can we share our expertise how can we offer advice to other services
how can they tap into what we know for the benefit of of local services
I think there's two things they can do first one is to go on our Improving Lives, Saving
Money web pages and they can download how to get involved as a whole section
and it sort of asks for you to ask you to describe your current service what
are you delivering and how are you measuring the success of that so we ask
everybody to have a go fill that to help send it in and then we'll work with
you to get more information and to get a clearer idea about what you're offering
and we can talk to you then about we'll use it as a national level we can say
you know his fantastic example of an occupational therapist working across GP
practices for instance but we'll also help you to think about how you might
use that locally to promote the good work that you're doing. The second thing
is think about what's happening regionally you know the the College has
regional groups we run road shows so then people can come along
to our road shows and we can talk to them about how do they promote
themselves locally and the road shows this year are also doing events where
they're inviting MPs local chief executives to come along
meet our members and understand all the good practices