Women’s Occupational Therapy Team at Ardenleigh Hospital
The Women’s Occupational Therapy team deserve this nomination due to their continuous hard work and dedication to supporting the service users at Ardenleigh who are detained in a women’s secure blended service who suffer with severe and enduring mental health conditions. The individual’s that work within this team are often faced with really difficult and traumatic situations as part of their everyday work and deserve to be recognised for their continued commitment and hard work. They provide 1:1 and group interventions to our service users to promote independence, increase confidence and provide re-integration skills back into the community to allow individuals to live a safe, meaningful life as independently as possible when discharged from hospital, often after being in hospitals for years of their lives. The team support the wider hospital by supporting in incidents, supporting staffing numbers on the ward and providing incident support and care and compassionate in all they do. On top of all the team does, they also support each other and can rely on each other when there are difficult experiences or challenges.
Some examples of the work the team does (list is not exhaustive): 1. Providing regular contact through 1:1 interventions such as cooking, baking, personal care & routine, community re-integration and education/vocation. 2. Supporting the wards when short staffed with observations or enabling service users to make meaningful use of their time. 3. Facilitating therapeutic worker roles, such as shop worker, gardener, newspaper role and kitchen cleaner role. 4. Always finding new and creative ways to encourage engagement in interventions such as creating new groups and projects. For example, the creative expression group was a lino-cutting group – which was a creative activity but also helped the team to look at motor and process skills. 5. Supporting more time in the community – either through referrals for constructive leave interventions to improve skills or by supporting the wards when short and facilitating leave with service users. 6. Supporting with education and vocational skills and opportunities – making links with places such as Beechcroft, Fircroft and local charity shops to support the service users to find meaningful roles within the community. A new group is also being set up to promote and develop vocational skills to prepare the service users for volunteering or paid roles in the community.