It was only through your genuine kindness and care that I can now uphold the occupational goals we worked together to establish … thank you for giving me my life back .”
It was only through your genuine kindness and care that I can now uphold the occupational goals we worked together to establish … thank you for giving me my life back .”
dietetic , psychological , nursing , peer support and evidence-based treatments , is important because of the irrefutable evidence that the power of occupation can mediate mental health issues and facilitate greater engagement and meaning in the everyday lives of those experiencing eating disorders ( O ’ Reilly and Johnson 2016 ).
This is instrumental to boosting their health and wellbeing , which , of course , is our end goal as caring healthcare professionals . So , my imperative was to figure out how to develop creative and innovative programmes of occupational therapy in the outpatient and day programme services I was employed in .
There had not been an active occupational therapist voice in our outpatient service for five years before I started in my role .
I began reading the available resources written about occupational therapy and eating disorders , but while I had one relevant resource I relied on ( Martin 1998 ), the evidence base was scant .
I began to regularly meet with the occupational therapy and eating disorders outpatient service leads to share my ideas on how the service could develop : from eligibility criteria – the number of sessions , intervention category and via one-to-one or group – to how to prioritise patients within the varied pathways offered within the outpatient eating disorders setting .
This required me to use an occupational therapy lens and question how our patients would best be occupationally enabled .
I screened patients with the multidisciplinary team , received referrals through multiple pathways and distinguished and justified why each patient pathway required a certain level of occupational therapy intervention .
This grouping was based on the NHS outpatient commissioning expectations for occupational therapy .
I was unable to see patients for the first few months and I was set to shadow , to explore as much as I could and develop the groupwork protocols ; for all intents and purposes , ‘ marketing ’ the occupational therapy service in outpatient eating disorders .
This involved connecting with local community members to explore what reach we could achieve to involve our patients in communities and prompting the multidisciplinary team to send referrals over to help build my caseload .
With time , and trial and error , my team and I quickly saw how much potential there was for therapeutic improvements in group and oneto-one settings , based on the valuable patient feedback and staff reports received over the nearly two years I worked with the team .
For example , within the intensive outpatient programme ( IOP ), patients shared testimonies on how occupational therapy had enabled them to put into practice , and progress , some of their psychological treatment goals and make progress in their eating and habit forming , with my supervision and support .
One patient said : ‘ It was only through your genuine kindness and care that I can now uphold the occupational goals we worked together to establish … thank you for giving me my life back .’
The lead of the IOP programme valued occupational therapy for our ability to unify our work and synchronise treatment goals together , to produce effective treatment outcomes , such as assisting one patient to feel more independent with her food shopping skills and no longer maxing out her finances each shop she completed .
Pushing boundaries
However , I found it could be isolating and disempowering to not feel like I had a solid knowledge base to turn to around occupational therapy and eating disorders when problem solving became more complex .
So , I developed and tailored my group protocols , integrated the existing evidence base into my therapy and fused occupational therapy interventions with modalities such as cognitivebehavioural therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy tenets , with supervision from my seniors .
I also had the opportunity to work with a peer support worker to foster a pilot project for the patient group , called First Response Early Episode for Eating Disorders ( FREED ).
We used the training we received from the organisation BEAT Eating Disorders , to create a three-week workshop that focused
36 OTnews May 2023