Occupational Therapy News OTnews October 2018 | Page 33

MENTAL HEALTH FEATURE
the person with these activities, and what we can do as a service to
help the person be more independent and live their life in the way
the individual would like to, as much as possible.
The outcome of sessions are written up and disseminated so that
all staff can benefit from the discussions.
Identified benefits for staff and service users
From these sessions, staff from across the service have identified
a range of benefits, including the sessions helping nursing staff to
better understand what occupational therapists do and helping
staff’s clinical reasoning and how they approach their practice.
The reflections and feedback also help occupational therapy staff
to tap into nursing staff’s knowledge and experience of individuals
to aid their activities of daily living assessment and reports of service
users.
They also allow occupational therapists to understand how
nursing staff consider and approach occupational issues, for
example activities of daily living, and the information from the
sessions can feed into psychological formulations.
All this together helps make care plans more holistic and
multidisciplinary team driven. Overall it seems to help to improve all
staff input and intervention for all service users.
Addressing the difficulties
I have been pleased with the benefits so far, although I am aware
that some difficulties still may need to be addressed.
Staff can have difficulties understanding occupational therapy
language and concepts. This may mean sessions need adjusting, or
it may be a factor that diminishes as staff become accustomed to
the format of the sessions.
This is something that I will continue to monitor and consider
whether a change – such as to language used like ‘occupational
identity’– needs to be made.
Staff can at times view the session as a more traditional
psychological formulation s ession. This has both positives and
negatives, as so much of a person’s occupational identity is made
up of their psychology, however, if left unchecked in the session the
discussion can wholly move away from occupation.
I am unsure how to best utilise the information from the session
to give maximum impact. Currently I am writing this up and
disseminating it, but I am unsure how much this is then being used
to inform care plans, core assessments, risk assessments, and most
importantly, the manner in which staff engage with service users.
Other difficulties are likely to present themselves along the way
as these sessions develop, however I plan to continue running the
sessions on a (currently) monthly basis to develop the protocol of the
session and hopefully improve their efficacy and therefore the service
user experience.
I see these sessions as potentially important, not only because of the
benefits discussed above, but also bearing in mind RCOT’s recently
published Strategic Intentions 2018-2023.
our service users.
At the launch of its Strategic
Intentions, RCOT asked all its
members to make pledges to
make their aspirations a reality. My
pledge is, therefore, to continue
to develop these occupational
therapy-led case formulation
sessions and help them to grow
within my service.
But I would like to go a step further than this and share the
concept of these sessions with as many occupational therapy and
health and care professionals as possible.
I have already started this by presenting a poster about the
session at the PCPsych Eastern Division conference and received
positive feedback from the medical and non-medical staff present.
I hope that such sessions could be expanded, not just within
my NHS trust, but across other NHS mental health services, and
potentially, outside of mental health also.
In expanding the services offering these sessions together
we will hopefully not only improve our own practice and that of
the staff we work with, but will help ‘enhance the profile of our
profession’ across a range of services.
With this in mind, if you are interested in running such
sessions in your service I would invite you to contact me so that
we can discuss the protocol in more depth and work together
to consider how it could be offered in your own services. The
more services using this model, the quicker it can improve,
and the more effective it can be in practice.
Graham Walker, senior occupational therapist, Suffolk
Rehabilitation and Recovery Service, Norfolk and Suffolk
NHS Foundation Trust. Email: [e-mail].
*With particular thanks to Genevieve Smyth, Sue Parkinson
and David Marsden
Value to the profession
Here, there is a great
importance placed on striving
to ‘enhance the profile of
the profession to a range
of audiences’. These
occupational therapy-led
case formulation sessions
provide an example of
an excellent platform to do
this, as the sessions very
much support non-
occupational therapy
staff to understand
occupational
therapy and what
we are bringing as
a professional to the
multidisciplinary team and to
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