Sheffield Occupational Therapy Clinical Academic (SOTCA) network meeting

A meeting of the Sheffield Occupational Therapy Clinical Academic (SOTCA) network was held on 26^th April 2017 at the Assessment and Rehab Centre, Nether Edge, Sheffield.

 

The network was started by Laura Di Bona and aims to improve outcomes and experiences for service users of a diverse range of occupational therapy services in and around Sheffield.

Occupational therapists based in Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Sheffield Children’s Hospital, Rotherham Housing Services, University of Sheffield, and Sheffield Hallam University attended.

 Dr Peter Cudd from the Centre for Assistive Technologies and Connected Healthcare (CATCH) gave a presentation to the group about ‘Cross disciplinary working’ in his work as a researcher, doing research with NHS professionals, health researchers, and other academic disciplines, such as computer science and engineering. It was really interesting to hear about this. Of particular interest was the project he led called ‘Collaboration Aimed at Building Occupational Therapy research (CABOT). Dr Cudd talked about what university researchers had found valuable about working with occupational therapists, and the research project ideas and research funding bids generated from this collaboration. He noted how key personal interest, capacity and availability were to facilitating work between academic researchers and NHS based occupational therapists.

 After the presentation, the occupational therapists chatted to each other and networked, identifying where each other worked and what their interests in research and service development were.

 Any occupational therapists, or occupational therapy students interested in doing research, service evaluation/development are welcome! You can come for general interest and/or use the group for support, for example project ideas, funding applications, conference or publication submissions.

Next meeting: date and location is TBC but is likely early June and may involve some of the group doing a ‘run through’ of presentations they have had accepted for the College of Occupational Therapists national conference this year. So if you are not able to attend that but would like hear these presentations, please do come along!

SOTCA has a new website at: http://www.catch.org.uk/current-project/sotca/ . If you are interested, please log on to it and register your details with our new Mailchimp account so you can be sure to hear about future work of the group. Also, please follow us on twitter @SheffOTCA