OT Week Celebrations

Happy OT Week everyone :)

Hope you've had a great week sharing the vision of OT and generally spreading the word of such a fantastic professional (yeah ... so I might be a little biased).

Unfortunately, I have to say that my OT Week has not been spectacularly different. I had great plans, some were lived out, others weren't, but I've really enjoyed hearing what others have been up too.

One of my main plans was to increase OT awareness in the setting where I work as a support worker. I had plans with the OT there to create a noticeboard promoting the profession and to hold some sessions to further explain the role of OT in the particular setting. As with all good intentions, things didn't quite go to plan though. Workmen never installed the noticeboard we were planning to use, and a sickness bug knocked down staff and clients alike to leave us too short staffed to run sessions :( but the plans and resources are still there to be completed another time on another day, and hopefully it will only be the dates on the OT Week pens that don't match up!

However, Tuesday came around and presented us (on twitter) with #OTuesday in #OTweek featuring #OTalk, which was guaranteed to cheer me up! This weeks topic was how to use SM for CPD and provoked some interesting discussions. So here is my experience and opinion ...

I first began using social media (SM) professionally after rediscovering my twitter account, and a slow Saturday afternoon searching by interest. I began tweeting about my experiences as an OT student; lectures I'd just been too, articles I had just read, and calls for help with assignments! I then started my blog when I struggled to fit everything I had to say into 140 characters! My main outputs of SM are on twitter, participating formally in OTuesday, NHSSM and more recently, OTalk and OChat. I also use twitter for informal discussions with OT students from other universities, practicing OTs and academics (a personal highlight was a tweet from E Duncan!).

I get a lot of benefits from my use of SM, the main one being the opportunity to communicate with so many other people, each with their own interesting stories and viewpoints on current issues. It allows exposure to a wider range of opinions - and with NHSSM, not just from OT perspectives - which breeds constructive debates. Another benefit of using SM is the speed at which information in shared. Previously we talked of how journals bypassed text books in getting information out there, now with SM your news, findings, thoughts and experiences are spread to a waiting audience instantly! I also find SM is a nice fall back for those days when the work can get too much, as a gentle reminder of why OT is so fantastic, why we do it, and mostly importantly why we love it!