OTnews June 2023 | Page 18

Student education

Feature

Developing confidence and leadership skills

Maggie Cartwright and Charlotte Dawes reflect on the highs of their recent remote leadership placement at RCOT .

F or their final leadership placement , two BSc students from the University of Worcester , Maggie Cartwright and Charlotte Dawes , were placed with RCOT ’ s Practice and Innovation Directorate , offering a unique opportunity for both to understand more about the work RCOT does for its members and also , and perhaps more importantly , to develop their personal confidence and leadership .

Here they share their reflections and learning from the eight-week experience .

A brand new placement setting

Initially , we were apprehensive about what the eight weeks would entail , as all our previous placements have been in clinical settings . We had many questions , including : Would we miss out on valuable clinical time ? How would we complete our assignment , which was framed around assessment and intervention ?

Our other concern was , apart from two trips to London for team meetings , the placement was entirely remote .

After speaking to staff at RCOT and our zoned academic from university , we were able to start seeing the links from a leadership placement to our assessment criteria and the occupational therapy process .

Once we understood the different teams and the individuals ’ job roles within them , we were able to understand how and what we could contribute to members ( RCOT ’ s service users ) and develop our own placement objectives and achieve our own goals .

A large part of the placement was spent working on RCOT ’ s 2022 workforce survey ( OTnews , May 2022 , pages 12-14 ) and we were initially overwhelmed by the amount of data involved . However , after spending time discussing this with each other and the RCOT team , we agreed on what we needed to achieve and set objectives that allowed us to divide up the data and tasks .

We also had opportunities to present our key findings to internal and external audiences , along with discussions at workforce summits across the UK , which , while nerve-wracking , built up our confidence in understanding as well as reporting on the data .

Working remotely

We both found it difficult to get used to remote working and spending a lot of time at home , however we put strategies into place , such as taking a walk at lunch and moving to different environments , to work to benefit our wellbeing .

We feel that we worked together as students effectively and ensured we communicated with each other and staff at RCOT if we had any questions or difficulties .

Communication has been a large factor in allowing our placement experience at RCOT to go well . We ’ ve worked together as students to check in with each other and it has been useful to have this peer support . Also , our practice educator , Karin Orman , RCOT Director of Practice and Innovation , offered us invaluable support , with opportunities for supervision and discussions to debrief and consolidate our learning and development .

Regularly checking in with other staff at RCOT , particularly in the practice and workforce team has also ensure our experience was positive and facilitated our learning .

For future occupational therapy students thinking of a placement oportunity at RCOT , we have created some ‘ top tips ’ for remote placements and a 90-second share video encapsulating our key learning .

What did we learn ?

This RCOT-based placement has been valuable for our leadership and learning . It has also

18 OTnews June 2023