Occupational Therapy News OTnews October 2018 | Page 26

FEATURE INTEGRATION
job, with a risk of loosing their professional identity, or
that they were not capable, or that something might
be missed.
These are all very genuine and understandable
fears and emotions that need to be recognised
and acknowledged. To help to overcome this we
developed a competency framework for staff to be
able to identify the gaps in knowledge and the skills
they want to learn and practice. The framework takes
into account the tasks that any professional can do,
with training, and the tasks that only the individual
professional can do.
Sam, a therapist who recently joined the team,
stated that, when working outside of traditional
roles, ‘we need support and training from
professionals, which is competency based and
gained from completing joint assessments with other
professionals’.
I have learnt that all professions consider
themselves to be holistic assessors, myself
included, but I feel it is only when you
immerse yourself fully into integration that
you realise what being holistic really is.
Working so closely with other professions
has given me a much deeper understanding
and respect for their knowledge and skills and
I am able to incorporate the things I have
learnt from them into my own practice.
I really didn’t know what I didn’t know,
so this experience has made me, and the
other professionals in the team, much better
at being holistic, which can only be of benefit
to our patients. This is the biggest reward of
integrated working.
The benefits of a multi-professional team
Patients benefit greatly from having support from
a multi-professional integrated team who have
the skills to identify the right problems. There are
no conflicting goals, treatments or care plans as
everything is agreed by the team and the patient
together. There is no waiting to be seen by another
professional or service, as everything required to
manage the crisis is completed within the team.
But the greatest benefit to patients is that
problems and solutions are identified from a much
wider pool of knowledge and skills than can be
achieved from a uniprofessional service. I have
found this to be the most effective way of achieving