In our April issue, the cover story is about the value of occupational therapy within addictions services.
We talk to Sandra Treloar, a Band 6 Occupational Therapist in Acute Neurology at Queen Alexandra Hospital, about her work to improve the links between acute neurology and the alcohol specialist nurse service, which started with a service audit back in 2015.
The aim of the audit was to establish how many patients the acute neurology team was seeing, where alcohol featured within their admission and new brain injury. This led to developing new standards of care for this patient group and developed links with the alcohol nurse specialist service.
This in turn created a brand-new role emerging placement opportunity, which led to an exciting permanent position for an occupational therapist within the team – the first it had ever had.
We also hear from Lisa Greer and Karen Symington, occupational therapists within NHS Lanarkshire, who describe how a small test of change in 2017 to assess the impact of occupational therapy in GP surgeries was grown into a successful service.
Supported and funded by NHS Lanarkshire’s mental health and primary care transformation programme, the initial initiative was part of a Scotland-wide programme to redesign primary care services by improving access to a range of health and social care professionals, through the development of primary care multidisciplinary teams.
The second phase, to test the effectiveness of the model on a larger scale, has resulted in the recruitment of 11 additional occupational therapy staff and the extension of the service to 21 GP practices across two NHS Lanarkshire localities.
Among other features this month, we find out how a creative activity project to explore stigma and identity is supporting patients at Rampton high secure hospital to reconstruct healthy feelings of self-worth (page 38).
And Linda Horan explains how, due to the reinvention of services during the pandemic, the multidisciplinary falls clinic at Guys Hospital had to find an alternative pathway that reduced risk and maintained quality of care.
We hope you enjoy this month’s magazine, and as ever, if you would like to share your innovative service developments or examples of good practice in a future issue, then please get in touch at editorial@rcot.co.uk. As well as the printed copy, you can also view the magazine online.