SHOUT's 2015/2016 Talks. 

SHOUT Presents Laura McQuillin - Paediatric Occupational Therapy

SHOUT were really lucky to have guest speaker Laura McQuillin deliver a talk last week on the role of paediatric occupational therapists, in particular relation to Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD). The talk began with a discussion around what DCD is in terms of subtypes, symptoms and the impact on the completing activities of daily living for children living with the condition. In order to explore the importance of vision and sensory skills in relation to coordination, Laura asked us all to shut our eyes and write our name on a piece of paper. The abilities of people in the room varied greatly, and this caused some amusement!

The importance of children receiving a diagnosis was also discussed, for example to enable children to receive support both at school and at home, to access relevant services such as occupational therapy and the importance of early intervention. We took part in a short quiz which revealed some interesting facts, 1 in 10 children receive a diagnosis of DCD, that's 10% of the population, 4% of the population require therapy. Interestingly in Scandinavia only 1-2% of the population receive a diagnosis of DCD, it was proposed that this is due to early schooling, meaning that interventions are put in place at an earlier age. Boys are more likely to receive a diagnosis of DCD, and the role of gender stereotyping and gender typical behaviours were discussed in relation to this.

Laura explained the service that she works in, and the importance of goal setting at the beginning of the therapy process, interestingly she explained that the children often have different goals to those of their parents, and also of the GP. Therefore as an occupational therapist she has to balance the wishes of a number of different people, but luckily she has time to address a number of goals as part of the therapy process. The interventions she discussed were focused around play, we were shown a video of a bike club intervention which is attached to this post.

Laura was a fantastic speaker, and we have received some really positive feedback from those who attended the talk, so thank you and we look forward to our next event!

Claire Craig- Dementia, Creativity and Connectivity 29th October 2014

Dr. Claire Craig is a qualified occupational therapist with a particular interest in the potential of creativity and creative approaches to promote communication and self-esteem for people with dementia. She currently works as a lecturer in occupational therapy and as a senior researcher in Lab4Living, an interprofessional research centre that brings together researchers in design, fine art and health, engaging in research with individuals and services to drive innovation and develop products in healthcare service design and delivery.

 In this evenings talk Claire will explore the role that the arts and design can play in promoting well-being for individuals living with dementia. She will also use it as an opportunity to describe some of the work that she has very recently been involved in.

If you want to find out more about Lab4Living go to:

http://research.shu.ac.uk/lab4living/

To get tickets for this event email Shout.event@gmail.com 

Joe Sempik-What a Fantastic First SHOUT event of the season THANKS JOE!

Connie introduces our first SHOUT talk of the season

After thinking that no-one would turn out for our first SHOUT event as the first biggest storm of the autumn seemed to be pounding at our doorstep; we nonetheless ended up having a fantastically well attended event. A variety of people from all sorts of different organisations attended, including representation from the local Sheffield therapeutic gardening group SAGE green fingers.

Joe talked about many of the different benefits and ways in which therapeutic gardening can impact upon social behaviour, defining its use as a ‘structured and beneficial intervention’ quite separate from leisure or domestic gardening. He acknowledged that although he himself is not an OT having in fact a pharmaceutical background, therapeutic gardening can be seen to draw on many OT models and frameworks.

Joe gave us a tour projects that he had been involved in and some other therapeutic gardens which enabled us to see how what we would consider the ordinary everyday make-up of the garden could be used to facilitate recovery. An ordinary garden path for example could be used to represent progression, a journey or a story of some kind.

We were shown one of Joe's recent research projects carried out by the charity THRIVE,  assessing the impact of horticultural therapy on various aspects of an individual’s functioning such as communication, social interaction, motivation, engagement and fine motor skills. To measure these Joe used INSIGHT which provides a single score for each aspect of functioning that was being measured, and Joe explained how this was carried out. 

The results of the study showed that there was a significant improvement in the areas of social interaction, motivation and task engagement when individuals were assessed at 12 months; however this effect began to 'fade' after this time with individuals scores reducing in this area.

After a comfort break, and a chance for the attendees to mingle and chat with each other, Joe took questions based on his talk. The audience were interested in what could potentially cause this fading in the skills that individuals were developing as a result of the horticultural therapy and Joe explained that it could be due to a variety of factors. One of these was the impact of individuals leaving the therapy programme once they were ready, leaving those with the lower scores on measurements of functioning still in the programme, this lead to a discussion about research methods.

This was a brilliant way to begin this academic year of SHOUT events, we have received some fantastic feedback about the talk and we would like to thank Joe for his time. We are now excited for our next talk, though hopefully the weather will have improved and no one will be battling high wind and rain to attend!

JOE SEMPIK- WED OCT 8th

Joe Sempik - Social and Therapeutic Horticulture: Measuring it effects on Social behaviour

Welcome back to SHOUT and our 2014/2015 programme. For our first session we will be hearing from Joe Sempik, a senior sociology researcher from Nottingham University. He will be talking to us about the effects of Horticultural initiatives on social behaviour.  Joe initially qualified as a pharmacologist, more recently completing a Masters in Environmental Management and moving into sociology research, specifically around the therapeutic benefits of horticulture or ‘green care’ on well-being .  He is an accomplished speaker and researcher and has published many articles on the topic and spoken at many different conferences including the Cumbrian OT graduate conference as the keynote speaker and for the Thrive conference, the UK charity for horticultural therapy amongst a few.  

Occupational Therapists have long since been aware of the therapeutic benefits of gardening with many Mental Health settings having therapeutic gardens and/ or allotments for use with their clients. Sheffield is  lucky to have facilities such as SAGE  greenfingers in Burngreave http://www.sagesheffield.org.uk/

  that works with adults to promote Mental and emotional well-bring  and Heeley City Farm http://www.heeleyfarm.org.uk/ a social enterprise that offers employment training for adults through the use of horticultural interventions.  Further to this, many of the local hospitals have their own gardens which are used for interventions with clients to promote well-being.  Culturally, with austerity and spend-thrift measures becoming more common place, a rise in the interest and popularity of creative interventions such as crafts and gardening is spreading and with this a recognition of the additional benefits to well-being is again being acknowledged.

With the likelihood of usage of horticultural therapy in practice therefore we believe this event will equip you with the knowledge and background to be able to explain and justify the usage of horticultural interventions and gain a more in depth understanding of their effects on social behaviour.  Joe will use his experience from being the chair of the international working group on the health benefits of ‘Green Care’ as part of the European Science Foundation’s COST Action 866, and his extensive years in research into the well-being of Children and vulnerable adults to explain and disseminate the links between horticulture and well-being to bring to you a both informative and insightful talk on the topic.  Please join us for this likely sell-out event! 

For tickets email shout.event@gmail.com to reserve your place £2 students/ BAOT members £3 non members. ALL WELCOME! 

SHOUT PROGRAMME 2014-2015

                          LAUNCH OF THE NEW PROGRAMME OF EVENTS 2014-15

Check out below the new SHOUT programme. We have some really exciting speakers and are predicting these are going to be really popular events. Why not pre-order your ticket at shout.event@gmail.com ?

We look forward to some interesting debate and discussion.

SHOUT at Conference 2014

SHOUT at the BAOT National Conference..... but where were all the men? 

 Were you there? Did you see us? How could you miss us? Our green t-shirts stood out a mile (well we felt like that when we were wearing them). Whilst having breakfast at the American Diner on our way to the first day of the conference we were even tweeted about.  We definitely felt like we didn’t need to SHOUT about our arrival that’s for sure. 

The annual BAOT conference for all OTs and students held a veritable plethora of new inventions, new ideas, challenges and paths for all to debate, peruse, think about and traverse. As a student myself still I felt overwhelmed and inspired by the vast amount of opportunities available in every available area.

Many of us attended a wide variety of presentations of interest and even helped out in presenting (anyone attend Collette Beechers 'Teaching Neuro the OT way?') and submitted posters that gained commendations (see Gillian Smiths’ 'Occupational Science and knitting poster').  The students in SHOUT did us proud! 

Shout meets Jennifer Creek or Jennifer Creek meets SHOUT?

SHOUT also networked with the ‘stars’ of OT including such big names as Anita Atwal Senior Lecturer of Brunel University particularly noteworthy as having just personally read front to back and back to front her book ‘Occupational Therapy and Older people’ for Claire Craig’s module Ageing and Occupation. We also chatted with the other star of OT  Jennifer Creek  whom I feel humoured our student exuberance at her presence and discussed her latest research with us which felt an honour.

An overall memory of the conference was the stark lack of male presence in attendance which struck me a hugely sad, as a ‘mild’ feminist, and someone whom believes in equality of the sexes this was I felt a real loss.  Female domination of thought could stand us at a disadvantage when carving out new and emerging roles for the profession, (which appears to be a major future projection) particularly gaining insight into working with emerging spheres that may be more traditionally male dominated. 

Finally, I would definitely attend Conference again, SHOUT had an absolutely amazing time and hopefully we will get the opportunity to attend again and promote OT and the work that we do at SHOUT to help promote the profession.