Occupational Therapy News OTnews May 2020 | Page 25

Five steps to a
COVID-19 FEATURE
big impact
A radical change to how one adult
social care team handles new cases
meant they were readily able to
shift assessments online during
the COVID-19 pandemic, hears
Andrew Mickel
T
here has been a rush of occupational therapists looking to start
virtual assessments since the COVID-19 pandemic began, but
the adult social care Reigate and Banstead locality team in Surrey
managed to complete their first assessment over FaceTime just
before the crisis began.
It marked the latest in five years of fundamental changes to how the team
treat new cases and decides how to work with clients. New tools have been
deployed to deal with overwhelming workloads, and a lot of work to gather
information on client environments is now done by the clients themselves.
It represents a big shift in what the occupational therapist is responsible for
– a shift that has cleared waiting lists and freed up staff time to focus on more
complex cases and preventative work.
‘The biggest thing to overcome with this is fear – we occupational
therapists have to trust our instinct and our experience and trust what our
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