Our Nominations

As promised, here are our nominations for the 2008 Edublogs award-

Best Individual Blog: Sarah's Musings. As a blog, this has helped us to develop the look and content of our own blogposts. As a blogger Sarah is one of the most honest and open people we have met in sharing her experiences and resources to all who visit her blog. She is prolific in her blog posting and is also a great commenter on others' blogs. Thanks Sarah

Best New Blog: Fiona's Journey is a really new blog that is already starting to become a valued resource from an occupational therapy perspective.

Best Resource Sharing: Meta OT - a valuable and dynamic resource offering varied and challenging posts and resources from the world of occupational therapy.

Most Influential Blog post: back to Sarah's blog here for a post entitled "Getting our knickers in a twist". This deals with aspects of online professionalism and confidentiality. It raised a number of issues that we then took into our own blog and had a good number of comments on this issue which is essential for all bloggers using the medium for professional discussion to consider

Best e-learning Blog: TechnOT is great for sharing and discussing all aspects for web 2.0 and technology in the education of occupational therapists. There have been some extremely useful sharings of platforms and reviews of applications available.

Best Educational Wiki: The 31 Day Challenges. These were so useful in helping us to become better blog citizens and gave a very clear idea of how to engage people in online learning.

Good luck to everyone and thanks to all of you for such interesting, inspiring and motivating blog posts over the last year.

Generic working eroding Occupational Therapy

In my previous position within a mental health assertive outreach team I was required to undertake the roles of occupational therapist and care co-ordinator. As the title suggests, care co-ordinators are compelled to oversee all aspects of a service user’s care, ranging from issues such as housing and benefits, to criminal and legal matters and illicit substance misuse.

The requirements of this role led me and a colleague to reflect on the generic work we were undertaking when acting as a care co-ordinator and how this was seemingly at odds with our role as occupational therapists. Whilst we could bring the philosophy of occupational therapy to care co-ordination, it certainly was not occupational therapy. For a more detailed discussion of occupational therapy and care co-ordination see our recently published article at https://share.acrobat.com/adc/adc.do?docid=b7ddbeb4-4fbc-4238-a169-7095d91c87c2

I understand that this generic way of working is not exclusive to mental health; it occurs in many other areas of occupational therapy practice. So why do managers and policymakers deem it an appropriate use of skills to oblige some occupational therapists to undertake generic working, in some cases on a vast scale? Some occupational therapists report to enjoy and value the variety of being able to work generically. But what could be more varied than occupational therapy? It is such a unique and diverse profession that has the potential to touch every area of human existence. The issue of generic working also raises the question of professional identity and to a broader degree the whole future of the profession. How is occupational therapy expected not only to survive, but thrive as a profession, when it is continually being eroded by generic working?

On the subject of Awards

A big thanks also to Sarah who has nominated us for an EduBlog Award 2008 in the Best Group blog category. The awards will be announced in december. Meanwhile , we shall be sending in our own nominations under the 14 categories by the end of the month. Watch this space.......

An Award for the Blog......

Thanks to Healthskills who has given us a Kreativ Blogger Award - and now we apparently get to choose 6 things we are happy about. Here goes:
1. It's nearly Xmas and semester 1 is beginning to draw to a close
2. Relevant practice placements have been found for all students currently on placement (after much hard work, networking and negotiation on the part of Viv and Chris)
3. The MSc Advanced OT programme is going well - with the negotiated assessment underway and places being booked already for next year
4. We have obtained provisional funding to send 4 students and a member of staff over to Romania next year for a week to work with a charity - Muzika in training the carers within the institutions (more blog posts on this soon)
5. We have sucessfullycompleted the four yearly review of the Undergraduate programme
6. It's nearly Xmas and semester 1 is beginning to draw to a close!

We also get to make awards to our 6 favourite blogs too. Watch this space for the results..........

National Occupational Therapy Week- wikiflash

So, we are now half way through National Occupational Therapy Week here in the UK, a designated time to carry out activity that will tell the public who, what, why, where and how we are. Regular followers of our blog will know that we have done something very different this year and organised a nationwide wikiflash (and indeed an international flavour with OTs from USA, Australia, New Zealand joining in - hello to you all and thanks).

Just thought this quick post could inspire and help you on your way to contributing - so please follow the links in Sarah's message and get flashing!!!

"It is OT week in the UK from the 3rd to the 8th November but wherever in the world you are please support OTwikiflash08 this week, and help to make wikipedia a fantastic source of information about everything OT.
To help you get started we have created a website at www.otwikiflash.net. If you enter your wikipedia user name (just register on the wikipedia site, it's quick and easy) you can join our roll call and print off a summary of your contribution for your CPD records. Clever hey?
If you haven't already you can also show your support for the event on facebook via the University of Salford Occupational Therapy group page.
Thanks for reading this, and enjoy your editing!"