Occupational Therapy - your questions answered! video transcript

I'm Dr Joan Howarth, I'm a senior lecturer in Occupational Therapy and my specialist area of practice is the core concept of occupation and how students learn that concept and how it's taught. This course is for individuals who are interested in working with people who have a range of physical or mental health disabilities
and other aspects that interfere in their ability to do their everyday life.

The career opportunities for occupational therapists is very very broad, they can go on to work in our NHS, in social services with people with physical or mental health disabilities, they can also go on to work in school in education establishments and also areas of research.

We have a wide variety of placement opportunities for our students, so if I think about some of the opportunities within hospital settings our students work with individuals with conditions such as a stroke, they might be working with young children who have a variety of disabilities, we also have placements within mental health settings so working with individuals whose mental health is interrupting their ability to continue with their day-to-day life. Some of those areas of mental health are very specialist and we've got placements within forensic mental health.

Other opportunities in placement is working out in the community, so working with individuals in their own homes, so that could be working with older adults to help them remain in their own home setting and we also have placements with our fire and rescue service, so occupational therapists work alongside fire and rescue officers looking at maintaining people safely within their home environment.

[Panning shot of the therapeutic kitchen facility with students using equipment at the Univesity of Derby. Wheelchairs, monitors, hand aids are all being used by students under the supervision of a lecturer.]

So the environment that we're in at the moment is our therapeutic kitchen so it's an adapted kitchen environment that allows people to use the different aids and adaptations that we use in practice to support people to undertake their daily activities.

[Students using hand aid equipment to open jars in the therapeutic kitchen under the supervision of a lecturer.]

We also have other adaptive areas such as our bathroom facilities and students, on occasion, also use our ward facilities to look at how they would be undertaking their work within a ward in a hospital environment.

[Student writing on paper on a large board in class.]

In addition to that, we as an academic team developed a virtual environment and we have a virtual home environment that students actually enter into with their avatars and it allows them to learn the skills of assessing somebody within a home environment to again, think about what a condition stops an individual doing in their everyday life.

[hand aid equipment being demonstrated by a student.]

For students who study occupational therapy at Derby, they're joining a programme that has a long-standing history of education in occupational therapy. The programme at Derby was created by the NHS for the NHS and we have been delivering occupational therapy education for over 70 years now.

So they're joining a team that has a wealth of knowledge and experience in education specific for the profession. The team that deliver currently occupational therapy education have a wide variety of clinical backgrounds that they draw upon to enhance the education programme. We're a mixture of full-time and part-time staff and some of our part-time staff are also currently practising clinicians, bringing the knowledge from the front line straight into the classroom.

Occupational Therapy - your questions answered! video

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