OT Week - Student interview with Andrea Morgan

Posted by Devon Partnership Trust in News on 7th November, 2024

This week we mark Occupational Therapy Week. The definition of an occupation is any activity that we need, want or like to do, to live and to look after our physical and mental health, and our emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

During this week, Occupational Therapy students are interviewing senior members of our organisation in order to understand how occupation relates to their wellbeing.

Today, Arran Hornewood , Lead Physical Health Practitioner asked Andrea Morgan, Head of Education and Training, her thoughts on occupational therapy.

What does the word ‘occupations’ mean to you?

Activity we do generally related to work.
Occupation doesn’t have to be work or profession related, they can be a variety of other activities.
It can be any activity you do such as walking, social tasks or day to day needs.

What does ‘occupational balance’ mean for you?

Balance between home, non-related work and working life professionally.
Also it is the balance between non-work related activities such as social activities, caring responsibilities like children, hobbies and daily tasks.

What might your barriers to achieving occupational balance be?

At present there is good balance through being disciplined in practice, managing time well.
Having a good understanding of balance in life and its importance and the effects of when this isn’t achieved.
Financial barriers are present today, for the majority of us, meaning if we needed to support a healthy work-life balance, such as reducing hours, it’s not necessarily possible.
Moral obligational values with maintaining and improving the service, to achieve Trust goals, supporting the team. This means it is hard to step away from achieving balance at times due to commitments and wanting to role model professionalism and good practice.

What small change or changes could you make to incorporate more balance?

More disciplined with taking breaks at work.
Better time management with meetings to allow breaks, a short period of time away from the screen, such as having 50 minute meetings as opposed to 60, back to back all day. This would be beneficial to people working from home, where previously travel time to meetings was needed, but now is filled with meetings.
Streamlining communication, only involving people when required to consider impact of time on others, examples can be directly emailing a person instead of replying to all when not relevant as this would be beneficial to service time.

Thank you to Arran and Andrea for sharing their insights for OT Week. Follow more about the week on social media using the hashtag #OTWeek.

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OT Week - Student interview with Andrea Morgan

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