LSBU: OT Student Society

Billy Mann joins the fun-loving gang of OT students at London Southbank University for their annual conference

Walk this way

I was invited recently by Headway East London, where I am a member, to talk to students at London Southbank University (LSBU) about Occupational Therapy. OT is a thriving department at LSBU, so much so that the OT Students Society holds an annual event in which they all get together to discuss the current issues facing their chosen profession and invite guest speakers to contribute. That's where I came in. Headway East London has a longstanding buddy relationship with the university and conducts training seminars at which students get to talk directly with people who have experienced brain injury.

For my own comfort, I always try to make my contributions to these events simple. I am no expert in brain injury, and neither do I have ambitions to be so. I just tell the story of my stroke and the aftermath in the hope that it fuels questions, which I try to answer as best as I can. I enjoy the process most when I can persuade an expert to join in just in case I panic and start fluffing my lines. My partner at this gig was Headway East London Clinical Lead Amanda D'Souza, who also kindly projected some pictures on to a screen while I ran through my jibber-jabber.

I got some good questions from the LSBU students. They asked me how OTs had contributed to my recovery. They asked about the classic OT-physio tag-team partnership that prevails. I said in my case it worked best as a threesome, OT-physio-patientclientserviceuserorwhatever, where we all fed off each other to advance the therapy. This, I said, could only have happened if we trusted one another. Happily, we did. 

In case I fluffed my lines

The title of this event was The Power of Occupation, its subtitle "maintaining professional identity in the face of change". I detected from this and from some of the questions that all was not happy in the land of OT, that they were feeling neglected and undervalued as professionals. 

This was not exactly a shock to me, but from the impressive display of organisation and attendance I was seeing today, I was surprised the LSBU students were struggling for status and recognition. It seemed to me like they were at the top of their game, and embracing it all with relish. Four years earlier, when I was in the neuro-rehab unit at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN) in Queen Square, London, my OT had told me that Occupational Therapy was misunderstood and its therapists unsure of their identity within the nhs. OT is a broad church, covering a large area from behavioural OT to hardline neuro. I mused to the LSBU students that one day new names for jobs might need to be invented. I don't think this offered them any comfort, and nor did my pronouncement that after a conversation one day with Headway East London OT Natasha Lockyer, I had come to define OT as a subspecies of Anthropology or Ethnography. I saw it as "the science of how we do things".

I had started my talk by telling the students that earlier in the day I had bumped into a neighbour, a head teacher at a special needs school, and told her that later I would be talking to OT students. "Ohh, I love OTs," she said, "and they make the best managers ever." This was a positive start and I'd tried to find a catchy soundbite to finish my talk, but as the endpoint neared, "Everyday OT is the key" started to sound flimsy, so I told them how my wife uses OT to get me to do chores. When she wants me to do things like set the dining table or empty the washing machine, she finishes her request with "It's good OT". I have a feeling she could be right about that.

Trust World Café: stroke care

An initiative to put good communication at the heart of stroke treatment got off to a lively start. Billy Mann reports.

Tess Baird is an unstoppable force. In November 2016 she gathered together a few colleagues and contacts in a small room in London's Mile End Hospital to explain her bonkers idea. She wanted clinicians and service users to get to understand and communicate with one another in more meaningful and effective ways. The subject in focus was stroke care, which is how I got the call, being a stroke survivor. She reckoned this new groundbreaking bond between patient and practitioner could be found using something called a World Café. I posted a report of that meeting shortly after it took place.

Table talk

Grand ideas often get lost in what is sometimes called Development Hell, so I turned up to that first meeting, made whatever kind of contribution I could and went home expecting the idea to fizzle out. It didn't. Emails were exchanged and the spark generated at the first meeting was oxygenated into a comfy campfire, around which a whole bunch of people (plus one newborn child, Leo) sat early in the new year to thrash out some ideas for how quality communication might flourish on the stroke ward. This event quickly got its own hashtag, #trustworldcafe. 


Seven round tables in the Garden Room at St Luke's Community Centre, London EC1, each hosting five or six people, fired up and the room quickly took on the buzz of the marketplace, the sound of chatter and earnest declarations bouncing off the walls. Hot beverages were taken and posh cake digested. And to think some people were pretending to 'be at work'. 

Question 1

The event swung around four questions. The first asked us to talk in pairs about a time we "totally trusted someone". What was the experience, what did it feel like? I got chatting with someone who told me how they had 'bonded' with their partner over an intense dislike of dating. As described to me this was a proper meeting of minds and outlook that was recognised instantly by both parties. They saw it as an 'opportunity' and both were 'relieved' to have found a sympathetic ear and a glad eye. It was heartwarming stuff. 

Cloth ears

We then moved the topic from the personal to the professional and asked what made trusting relationships function in the workplace. The answers we arrived at jointly sounded like statements of the bleeding obvious, but put under intense scrutiny started to carry more weight. All the time we were jotting words and phrases on to a paper tablecloth. Lines such as "say what you do and do what you say" and "deliver on promises" put some flesh on to the bones of everyday exchanges that involve trust, and which without trust would collapse. Relying on others is how our lives function.

Question 2

From working in pairs we moved to working the table, exploring within the group the mechanics of trust and how that might be nurtured. I learned of one stroke survivor's desire to ride a horse again, having grown up around horses in Romania. By now an artist had been earwigging at each table and was busy creating a 'live graphic' of our thoughts. It was worth stopping just to watch as she gave visual birth to all our ideas.

The #trustworldcafe 'live graphic'

The questions continued. We moved tables, went into huddles, struggled to find answers, but didn't give up. There was still plenty of cake left. At one table I put forward the idea that every 'hard', factual question a patient is asked by a clinician should be offset with a 'soft' question that gently explores the patient's life outside hospital. Cat or dog? was the example I used in a round-the-table demonstration (our table: three dogs, one cat and an awkward "cat and dog"). Questions about football, hobbies, telly, films, etc, can provide the therapist with valuable 'clues' that might open a window of opportunity on how best to advance treatment. There was some concern as to how what is essentially small-talk can be parlayed into 'productivity', the looming presence of a cash-conscious clipboarding nhs manager being the sticking point. I'm not sure my attempt to liken this kind of information-gathering to 'detective work' found any buyers. 

Libby and Aoiffe

So what did I learn at the #trustworldcafe? Too many things to list here, so please check the Twitter feeds for details. But if I had to pick one it would be at the beginning of the session when, by way of a warm-up, Tess gave us a list of questions to ask each other. The last of these was something like, "What is the craziest outcome you can imagine springing from this #trustworldcafe?" To illustrate, Tess told us her answer. It was that news of this event's runaway success reaches a rich publisher, who invites Tess to write a book about it, earning her £4million. Her newfound wealth somehow puts her in contact with George Clooney, who promptly ditches his existing wife and marries Tess. And everyone lives happily ever after. Such is the power of the hashtag.