People working in policy and public affairs have a love-hate relationship with party conference season. It’s intense and chaotic, with long hours and carefully prepared plans shredded at short notice because of some crisis or another. But, at the same time, there is no better way in which to immerse yourself in the mood of the parties and other stakeholders, to get your message across and to test your strategy for the coming year. So I was looking forward to my first ‘real’ RCOT conference season.
The conference experience is sharply different from what you might expect from seeing TV or newspaper coverage. If you’re wise, you’ll spend very little time in the main conference hall. Most of those speeches are available to read afterwards. The main activity for people like us is in the conversations you have, whether by attending fringes (events run by independent organisations, which may be think tanks, organisations like ours or businesses), taking part in roundtables (such as those organised by the Community Rehabilitation Alliance of which we are part) or meeting contacts old and new. There is so much going on and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is real.
What we did
The three main questions with which we went to Brighton and Manchester were:
- Where are the parties on issues relating to occupational therapy, and are there hot topics we’ve neglected?
- What arguments should we be using, especially with those people who disagree with us?
- Who should we be working with – old partners and new?
Twenty-two fringes, three roundtables and five meetings – across subjects from mental health, workforce, primary care, health inequity and the attitudes of the public to said inequality – later, we have returned home with a list of potential new partners, especially in mental health, social care and education. We hope we have made the case for better mental health provision especially for children and young people, for greater provision in primary care, and expressed frontline concerns and problems. On a personal note, it was great to finally meet my colleague Ben Powick in person after a year working together on Zoom and Teams.
What we learned
It was great to hear other organisations talking unprompted about the importance of timely, person-centred occupational therapy. The profession is valued and I have a sense that some of the barriers we have previously been talking about have been understood. There’s a great deal still to do, of course.
One challenge is that across public health there is a job to do in talking to the public. We don’t think that enough people understand what ‘health inequalities’ (nor, for that matter ‘health disparities’) means and although much of our work in this field is aimed within health and social care – where people do understand it – a lot of the pressure on the NHS and social care is generated from the public. We need them to understand our work, to support it and to ask for it.
Another challenge lies in technology, where attitudes were sharply different between those who are cognisant of the digital divide and others who ignore it completely. For us, I think that there will be a need in the coming months to be clearer about what is going to provide service users with the right care, and the benefits and risks ahead.
I’ve come away from Conference exhausted but energised, with a long list of follow ups. We’ll digest our learnings still further and feed them into next year’s business plan.