OT researchers on mission to improve services for patients and families across UK

Occupational therapy researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University are on a mission to improve vital community services for patients and their families across the UK.

Occupational Therapy Lecturer and Research Fellow Katie Roddick and Professor of Occupational Therapy Katrina Bannigan were awarded £20,000 from the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT) to fund a year-long research project, entitled Mapping Service Improvement in Occupational Therapy.

Katie said: “We want to understand the experience of service improvement in occupational therapy because service improvement helps to improve outcomes for patients, their families and carers. Mapping this information will create a resource for occupational therapists to guide service improvement.

“This research needs to be done now because the knowledge about service improvement is not collected in one place which means it is hard for occupational therapists to know how to approach service improvement.”

The study is a scoping review which involves searching for all the information that has been written about service improvement in occupational therapy, analyse it and uncover what works and what doesn’t.

The researchers, from the School of Health and Life Sciences’ Research Centre for Health (ReaCH), will set up a patient and public involvement group with people who have experience of occupational therapy.

They will be working with the University’s partner health board NHS Lanarkshire, who will help them reach out to patients and services users. The group will be involved in discussions at each stage of the project, including the protocol, the searching, the analysis of findings, and how we share the information.

The plan is to share the key lessons about service improvement with occupational therapists through articles in journals they read and presentations at conferences they attend. Researchers will also work with people in practice locally to develop education about service improvement based on their findings.

Professor Bannigan said: “We are delighted to have been awarded this funding which recognises GCU’s strong commitment to building research capacity and capability, as well as enhancing our partnership with the occupational therapy team in NHS Lanarkshire.”