Occupational therapists need to be agents of change in complex systems, members heard at this year’s Elizabeth Casson memorial lecture.
Dr Sarah Kantartzis, senior lecturer at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, asked the audience at RCOT’s annual conference if occupational therapists were addressing the major occupational challenges facing the UK population.
They include working with the unemployed - particularly groups with higher rates such as people with long-term mental health problems, learning disabilities and asylum seekers - the 14.3 million people living in poverty, the 320,000 homeless people and six per cent of the population experiencing loneliness.
She also asked whether occupational therapists were fully helping people in violent and dangerous occupations, including the estimated 27,000 children in England and Wales in gangs, or to help the people affected by the 40,000 annual knife crime offences or those with ‘non-sanctioned occupations’ such as addictions.
She argued that thinking about complex systems, following the model of philosopher Paul Cilliers, would help understand a broader view of the systems that occupational therapists find themselves working in.
Doing so would mean occupational therapists adjusting to complex mechanisms of decision-making, but which would allow them to ‘work in the reality of a complex world’ and allow them to become experts in occupation when dealing with all agencies relevant to a given problem.
Examples of projects that have done so include the work in Glasgow to treat knife crime as a public health issue and the obesity programme in Amsterdam.
This year’s lecture will be published in a forthcoming edition of the British Journal of Occupational Therapy.
It was also announced that next year’s lecture will be delivered by Dr Jenny Preston, consultant occupational therapist at NHS Ayrshire & Arran, at a standalone London event that will also be streamed live online.