Student education
Feature
Extended scope placements make for an exciting and challenging time for students , developing their knowledge of occupational therapy from class into valuable experience . One way to prepare yourself for the many varied extended scope placements is to hear the stories of those who have experienced these types of placements before you .
We are four occupational therapy students from Sheffield Hallam University who participated on a part-time , nine-week placement with a fantastic charity called Access the Dales , which aims to increase disabled access in the Yorkshire Dales .
For our placement we focused on developing a sight guided walk for blind and partially sighted people and establishing hubs for people to hire free all-terrain wheelchairs .
The sight guided walk required us to get extra training for guiding blind and partially sighted people and to plan routes suited to their needs . To build the hubs we needed to work with other charities and businesses to build connections and promote the service , along with the complex task of setting up the booking system .
Planning ahead
There were certainly challenges that came with working for a new charity 130 miles away from our university base in Sheffield .
The distance added a layer of difficulty ; it meant that we could only travel up and stay in the Yorkshire Dales every other week , requiring us to practise distance learning in between . This tested and developed our communication skills .
The extended scope setting meant that for the first time we were not working with a qualified occupational therapist on site . This was challenging , as it meant that we had the responsibility of ensuring we were always working within our professional standards and were assertive when needed .
However , with the support of our group and long arm supervision , this was managed well and by the end of the placement we all felt that our confidence had grown , and we were more prepared for working independently in the future , applying occupational therapy theory into practice .
Initially we began to scope the service to identify how occupational therapy students could assist the charity ’ s launch festival , where we gained a great deal of interactive feedback with service users , exploring their personal insights into accessibility .
People with reduced mobility face consistently more barriers and fewer opportunities to access leisure occupations .
For people with long-term illness and disability , getting out into the countryside is so beneficial to their mind , body and soul and working with us has helped these occupational therapists of the future gain a wealth of experience of how this can be achieved .”
Various reports from Natural England outline how individuals with disabilities are less likely to engage recreationally due to mental , cultural or physical barriers , alongside factors such as transport , cost , information , vulnerability and social isolation .
When we were considering designing our interventions , we had to think about the aspects of accessibility that are limiting occupational engagement and causing individuals to become occupationally deprived from accessing the outdoors ( Sakellariou et al 2017 ; Hammel 2021 ).
Common barriers we observed that make wheelchair accessibility and social inclusion difficult in the Yorkshire Dales include types of terrain , gates , gradients , lack of accessible facilities and accommodation ( Kemmis et al 2021 ).
We utilised our occupational therapy skills , such as environmental analysis and activity analysis of the wheelchairs , to aid in the development of resources that provide reliable accessibility information , so that individuals can make a confident and informed choice when visiting the Yorkshire Dales .
These included developing a booking website , route audits , route maps , risk assessments and access audits of the towns .
Enabling better access
Our main intervention throughout this placement was to make the countryside more accessible to individuals with disabilities using all terrain wheelchairs .
We identified that to achieve this we needed to make using the all-terrain wheelchairs more accessible to service users , so we produced a range of accessible resources that can be used by service users while visiting the hubs .
The first step of this was to create a booking website that details the specifications of the different wheelchairs , so that people can make
© photos by Access the Dales
November 2022 OTnews 17