Meet Jo and Hannah: Occupational Therapy Students on Placement at the AWRC
Jo Townshend and Hannah Adams are mature students in the final year of their MSc Occupational Therapy (OT) course at Sheffield Hallam University. They are in their final year and recently completed a 12-week research placement at the AWRC on the Active Wait project.
The Active Wait project aims to help people in Sheffield needing hip and knee replacements remain as active as possible while they wait for their surgery. A 12-week digital tool is being created with weekly lifestyle change topics and strengthening exercises. When launched, people will be able to complete the programme independently at home.
Hi, Jo and Hannah! Can you tell us a bit about the type of work were involved in while on your placement?
Jo: In the early few weeks of the placement, the aim was to familiarise ourselves with the demographic and project aims. We joined the project when the digital resource was being finalised and we were asked to provide an OT perspective on some of the topics included in the digital resource.
Hannah: The main piece of work we completed during the placement was an implementation plan for the project. We carried out a rapid literature review to find research on other digital interventions that had been carried out in the NHS to promote lifestyle change and promote exercise.This allowed us to develop our research skills and led to us delivering a presentation of our key findings. These implementation strategy findings were used to inform project plans.
How were you supported while on placement?
Hannah: Rachel Young, who is a physio by training, was our on-site educator and we each had separate OT long-arm supervisors (LAS) who supported us. Jo’s LAS was an OT who works locally in private practice and my LAS was a retired OT living in Devon.
Over the 12-week placement, we worked together on tasks set by Rachel that contributed to project deliverables. We also attended weekly project team meetings and also had the opportunity to visit clinical settings at key points along the patient pathway.
We hear you were also asked to develop a strategy for evaluating the intervention once it has been offered to patients. Can you tell us more about that?
Hannah: We designed an interview guide for patients who had both engaged and not engaged with the intervention, and also an interview guide for staff involved in the service,”
Jo: This was also a great opportunity to put into practice the theoretical knowledge we’ve developed in lectures
Did you have the opportunity to see the real-world application of the project?
Hannah: Yes, the clinical shadowing days gave us a valuable chance to meet patients and provide the context to how the Active Wait tool would benefit the population.
Jo: Seeing each stage of the patient pathway alongside the research work that we undertook gave us a unique experience to gain an overview of the whole process. We got to spend a morning with a consultant at the outpatient clinic where patients were listed for surgery, we visited Joint School where patients were given more information about what to expect from surgery, and we attended the pre-op clinic where patients’ fitness for surgery was assessed, and we also went to the post-op ward for patients following surgery.
Finally, would you recommend this type of placement to other students?
Jo: Absolutely! It was interesting and varied and we learnt a lot about the reality of carrying out healthcare research and its importance in developing services that are responsive to patient needs.
Hannah: Yes, definitely. It has also opened up further opportunities, for example, after the placement had finished, I managed to spend a day watching a hip replacement and knee revision operations on invitation from the consultant I met on my clinical shadowing day.
Many thanks for speaking to us, Jo and Hannah, it sounds like you had a fantastic time on your research placement.
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