A medical clinician said to me at a recent conference: "There is no real choice for people in the NHS. Austerity, staff shortages and increased workload, mean that providing personalised care is a luxury most clinicians don’t have time for".
I write this not to criticise another professional, but simply to illustrate something I've heard before from others.
It was clear from our conversation, that she was someone who put people she worked with, her "patients", at the core of everything she always did. She could have had a better paid job, could have found a role with more sociable hours and could have not been so willing to work beyond her contracted hours were her core beliefs not centred around providing the best possible care for people. But she chose to stay. A scenario familiar to many health and social care professionals.
Before I had chance to get into a deeper conversation about the importance of personalised care, somehow slipping in my favourite quote linked to research on personalised care ("Where is the research on non-personalised care?!") and the crowning argument of personalised care ("surely, if able, you want to be part of important decisions about your health care?") we were called back to the conference.
As an occupational therapist I know that our great profession has personalised care in its DNA, yet I appreciate that the current health and social care sector does challenge this. But we should never be complacent. How often do you question whether your practice truly focuses on what matters to people, their strengths and personal goals?
It couldn't be a better time to be an occupational therapist, now that policy and legislation are speaking our language. As put beautifully by a colleague here at RCOT recently in relation to the increasing the profile of social prescribing; "Health is catching up with occupational therapy". Although related to the NHS, this could be equally applied to other areas of social care across the four nations.
Now that others are "catching up", the challenge for us as a profession is to not get left behind, but rather to lead and innovate in this area. There are great examples of this already but we need more. Personalised care isn't the latest NHS trend or fad; it's an overdue change in focus for health and care, a movement to get health and care professionals to think and act differently.
Our new report, Making personalised care a reality: The role of occupational therapy, is the latest in RCOT's Occupational Therapy: Improving Lives, Saving Money campaign. It builds on our previous five reports explicitly using the language of personalised care. It couldn't be more timely, given the NHS commitment to personalised care in the Long Term Plan in England and similar processes across other UK countries.
In the report, we highlight the three areas where we all can support personalised care:
- focus on people's strengths and balancing choice and risk
- enable people to take part in daily activities that are important to them
- ensure that people stay connected to family, friends and communities.
As experts in personalised care, occupational therapists are ideally placed to support and lead health in moving away from a medicalised model to one that is centred around the individual. We need to shine a light on existing good practice to show others how it's done.
So our time has come to push forward and demonstrate our value in this area. But we are a finite resource and that must be used wisely. As such we have four recommendations for occupational therapists,and for those wanting to make better use of their occupational therapy workforce - with people at the centre.
To empower people to manage their health and wellbeing, occupational therapists should be deployed across the health and care system to:
- intervene early in primary care
- embed personalised care through training and supervising others
- develop wider partnerships to further innovation
- expand therapy-led services.
So please get engaged and let us know what you are doing in this area or how occupational therapy could be used differently.
Occupational therapists' time has come to take a lead on the shift to personalised care.
Paul Cooper, Paul.Cooper@rcot.co.uk