Inspirational Story

What influenced your choice of profession?

If I am honest, I had no idea what an occupational therapist was until a few years ago.  I had never come across this field in my life until 2019 when my stepfather had a stroke.  He spent several months recovering in hospital, and I spent a lot of time visiting him.  During these visits I became increasingly fascinated with the role of the occupational therapists, and by coincidence had a new neighbour move in who is an OT and discovered a friend was studying it at Bradford University.  I had many conversations with them that convinced me this was something I wanted to do.

I was accepted to study it at a strange time as it was just as the first covid lock down went into effect, and my first year of the degree was completely online.  I have a previous degree in Psychology but that was nearly 20 years ago, and I had a naive expectation that this might mean I would be better prepared for studying again.  My initial essay marks gave me quite a rude awakening to this not being the case.  The degree had its ups and downs, mostly good placements though at least one that left me questioning if I had made the right decision.  If I had known that the profession could involve the type of work I am doing now, I think I would have been a much better student!

How did you come to be in the role you are in now?

I ended up in my current role quite by accident.  In third year, I had a role emerging placement lined up and then weeks before it was due to start was rushed to A & E with an appendicitis and had to spend several weeks recovering.  At the time this felt like a disaster, I had been looking forward to the role emerging placement and was quite upset I would miss out on it and would have to graduate later than everyone else.  Amor fati, or learn to love one’s fate, became my new catch phrase and as it turned out this would prove to be one of the best near-death experiences one could hope for.

As I missed out on my original role emerging placement, I was instead sent to do one at the sustainability department of Bradford District Care Trust.  This was a department I never thought I would have any overlap with when studying to be an occupational therapist and was excited and surprised to learn that they were interested in looking into “green/nature therapy” as a more sustainable model of healthcare.  I had a vague understanding of nature therapy but had never considered it could be an aspect of an OTs role or something that the NHS might offer.

Our placement looked into what, if any, green therapy was taking place in the Trust, what more could be done and eventually writing a business case to argue that there should be a dedicated green occupational therapist whose job would be to incorporate green therapy within the Trust.  The placement was fantastic and really opened my eyes to the power of nature in mental health recovery, and it came at a time when everything nature therapy seemed to be in the zeitgeist anyway, with stories seemingly every week in the newspapers about the benefits of wild swimming etc.

Once the placement was over, I went back to university and finished my degree, presuming that sadly that would be the last I had any involvement with nature therapy.  Fate would step in once again though.  During the placement we had meetings with several nature organisations including Natural England who were impressed enough with our ideas that they provided initial funding to trial a Green OT.  Meanwhile, rather than finding an OT role immediately as most of my fellow graduates had done, I had instead escaped to visit family in Australia.  A decision that at the time seemed a bit reckless but would turn out to be perfect timing as it meant I was still free to take up the role once it became available.

What does being an Occupational Therapist in ‘Green Therapy’ look like?

So, my current role is “Green Therapy Development Officer”, I can’t imagine there are many others out there with that title in the UK.  The role has been to essentially embed as much nature therapy as possible within the Trust, originally planned as a 6-month trial, I have now been here for 18 months.

The role has been a mix of making the connections with various organisations such as the Canal & River Trust to organise collaborative programmes and the more hands-on clinical work with being present and helping teams to run these sessions with their service users such as on our community allotment.

18 months in and we now have several different teams accessing nature for their service users.  We have two community allotment groups, and two inpatient allotment groups.  We have just run an 8-week canoeing and walking sessions with the Canal & River Trust, in the next few months we will be taking service users out walking with the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority.  We run these sessions every week and are always expanding to new teams in different areas of the Trust.

Every day is different then, one day I will be gardening on an allotment, the next out canoeing on the canal, the next taking service users on nature walks identifying the local trees and bird songs.  Though there are also plenty of days when I am in the office too, organising future sessions and collaborations.

What’s the best thing about this role?

The best thing about this role is seeing the positive effect it has on our service users.  You can get a taste of this in the film we made (see below) but even that couldn’t come close to capturing the true impact.  We have so many service users who barely left the house a few months ago and are now coming canoeing every week.  They often tell me how much they look forward to our sessions, in fact several of them have returned to working recently but made sure they had the time of our sessions off still.  Others have opted to come back as volunteers once they are discharged.

It isn’t just our service users either, staff have told me how much the sessions help their own wellbeing.  One of my colleagues told me they felt it was a chance to do real OT work again, and we recently had a student on placement with us who enjoyed it so much they’ve opted to come back as a volunteer.

What are your hopes for the future?

As I mentioned, I had no real idea about any of this when I was a student myself and I wish that I had.  Now we are trying to change this by working closely with the University of Bradford so their students are aware of what it is and how we can use it with our service users.  Hopefully in a few years’ time it will be so embedded within the NHS that it won’t require any explanation to what a Green Therapist is.