ideas for tasks to do at home

Scoping the local area

Signposting clients to a range of charitable organisations is a key part of the healthcare professional's role in practice. By researching and collating a usable and up to date list of local charities and resources, you will not only understand your local area better, you will have also provided your educator/mentor with a vital piece of information, which they and you can share with clients.

Think about how you share this... contact numbers/web addresses / web links / addresses / map / pictures...

If you are sharing this information with others, consider the accessibility of this information by thinking about a range of ways of presenting the information.

Reflection Diaries

Reflections are an ongoing process. However when you are not always with your educator/mentor, you need to demonstrate your clinical reasoning and your general thought process (decision making, challenging internal prejudice, evaluating impact etc).

You need to find a way to share these reflections with your educator/mentor. Think about how you can develop either an online reflection diary, sharing photos of paper diaries or voice recorded reflections. You could save these to Pebblepad and share them from there.

REMEMBER: when you are uploading reflections to Pebblepad it is a good idea remove any names of individuals, organisations or teams because if you use them as evidence for an assignment, this would count as a breach of confidentiality

Once you have spent some time in a setting you can start to use models of practice to make sense of the needs of the people you meet. For example, you could use the information that you have gathered from a range of sources to populate the headings used by Model of Human Occupation. From this, you can identify your priorities and a treatment plan.

Pestel Analysis

One way of understanding the bigger issues affecting the people you work with, is to use a tool such as the PESTEL. Think about the people that your service supports when you do this and use this as a tool / prompt rather than a very strict task.

This screencast might help you to understand the PESTEL a little more if you are not familiar with it. It was made for one of the OT level 6 modules, so you can ignore the references to assessment and the module name!

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT is a great way of understanding how an individual, profession, team or service can meet the needs that it is seeking to service. It's important to think beyond the actual SWOT to consider how you will build on the strengths, address weaknesses, optimise the opportunities and overcome or manage the threats.

Putting the Pestel and swot together

This video shows how you can use your PESTEL to work out what the context is and the SWOT to consider how you (or your service) fits within that

clinical formulation

teach the service about something new

There may be a new approach or piece of research which is new to the team, you could take on the role of researching this and developing some teaching materials for the staff, you could deliver this face to face or online.

Develop a new resource

This might be something which will be used by future students (for example an information pack or glossary of terms used on the placement), it might be something which is aimed at patients or service users (for example a guide on fatigue management to be given out by clinicians, or a self help programme on building confidence with being outside).

practise assessments and interventions at home

You could assess your own home environment, measure for equipment, teach someone how to do a task differently, or teach them a new task. Just make sure it is something which is relevant to the placement, your own learning objectives and you reflect afterwaers