Hello there!
In the spring the Green Occupational Therapy Network was relaunched as the Occupational Therapy Sustainable Practice Network or OT Susnet. Since then I’ve been the network lead through a very busy eight months. So, what’s been happening? Here’s the first in a series of blogs, reviewing some of what we’ve been up to and previewing upcoming blogs.
We hope that you like the new look of the CSH website and our OT Susnet pages. You can let us know if you have any thoughts or suggestions for the site here. To support the development of the sustainable occupational therapy practice evidence base we plan to set up a research priorities page and you can share ideas about this here.
We’ve been invited to present at universities around the UK this year, including keynote talks I gave for student conferences at the University of Coventry and University of Northumbria. I found both conferences very inspiring with students demonstrating such creative thinking in exploring new ways of applying occupational therapy practice. There’ll be a blog about the workshops exploring sustainable practice at the Northumbria conference and Mike Morgan will blog about some of the very interesting projects he’s involved with in Coventry.
Lordson Simpson will be blogging about what it’s been like to be involved the BAOT Sustainable Practice Local Group (South East Region) and he’ll give you some pointers on how to set up your own. The group’s poster is on our resources page.
At last month’s Society for the Study of Occupation: USA conference in Utah, various members of OT Susnet were involved in two panels exploring issues of sustainability and occupational justice, titled ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ and ‘Sustaining Occupation’. A few of us presented virtually with video presentations and followed this with Skype group video calls for the panel discussion. It was really exciting to be able to present at a national conference abroad from the comfort of our own homes! We’d like to thank SSO:USA for waiving our fees as we did not appear in person. Mark Hudson, Mami Aoyama and Moses Ikiugu will blog about their experience of putting together these panels and of attending the conference in person.
We’d also like to thank the University of Brighton for inviting OT Susnet on to their stall exploring sustainable occupations at this year's COT Annual Conference and UNISON for inviting us to have our first stall this month at the BAOT/UNISON National OT Stewards’ Seminar in Birmingham. At each of these I facilitated a workshop exploring Sustainable Action Planning. As well as considering some of the many short term threats to services that were being explored elsewhere at these events, Sustainable Action Planning allows OTs to plan in a longer term way with multiple benefits to services.
Samantha Shann approached me about leading a team to write a WFOT position statement on environmental sustainability. Six of us have finished the first draft and it’s been great working together internationally on this. Watch this space!
This year we’ve been making an increasing number of international links and it’s exciting to feel part of a new movement towards sustainable practice in occupational therapy. If you’d like to join us, do sign up to OT Susnet and you could share this link: http://sustainablehealthcare.org.uk/networks with others who you think might be interested too. And let us know if you’d like to be more involved.
We’re always on the lookout for new funding opportunities for our work and if you have any ideas about this it would be great to hear from you.
Best wishes,
Ben
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