OTnews August 2020 | Page 48

FEATURE INTEGRATION
Reading
the
signals
Health and social care occupational
therapists in Glasgow City are
navigating new joint roles with a traffic
light system for competency. Here’s
why the plans got the green light
Occupational therapists are rightly proud
of their ability to work in both health and
social care services, but how many get
to work across both at the same time?
As organisations up and down the country have
looked at integrating services, bringing the profession
together poses both an opportunity to work more
efficiently, but also a challenge in how to bring together
staff who have learnt to work in very different ways.
It was a question that faced Glasgow Health
and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) when it was
first created in 2014, to foster better integration and
service delivery.
The following year, Glasgow City HSCP
commissioned a review of its occupational therapy
services, which concluded that the two discrete
roles for the 190 occupational therapy staff in health
and 40 in social work be rebadged as a new HSCP
occupational therapy role.
‘We were hearing quite frequently there would be a
mental health occupational therapist and then a social
work occupational therapist visiting someone when
actually only one person was needed,’ says Dorothy
Rae, the mental health care group lead who was
heavily involved in the work.
‘We needed to try and evaluate what exactly
occupational therapists were delivering to make sure
the service was as streamlined as it could be.’
Green for go
The new role was intended to build on the common
learning that all occupational therapists undertake as
part of their training, while removing organisational
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48 OTnews August 2020