A week in the life of a final year OT student.

Monday- Thursday:

This week I had to attend a 3 day, conference style module called Partnerships. It is a module that builds upon partnerships 1 & 2 that were attended in first and second year. It is a multidisciplinary module attended by OTs. PTs, nurses, & osteos, with the intention being “to prepare students for working in partnership within diverse teams/agencies and across professional and organisational boundaries on graduation, including evaluation of their professional profile and continuing professional development strategies”.

The conference had three key themes: leadership; management of change; management of

quality. Each day of the conference presents a lecture and workshops focused to each theme respectively. The theme of interdisciplinary learning (collaboration and partnership working) continues through all three days of the conference. There was a fair bit of pre reading and pre session work to be completed prior to attending.

On arrival I was really dreading it because previous years have proven to be dry and quite boring. The lecturers were long, and although they contained useful information, it was information that we could have gained for reading the slides prior to the seminar, or given chapters to read so it all felt pointless.

Trying to not be negative about the fact that we left the house at 7:15 and sat in traffic to be there, I arrived to my seminar group open minded. Within the first 5 minutes I learnt 3 things. 1. The nurses hadn't done the work (again, I worked in a group with 4 nurses last year); 2. The osteo didn't have a clue what was going on and it didn't appear that applicable to him; 3 No one was interested in doing the work and talked about their 'sick nights out'. On the first day the pre work was linked to the seminar content, but only on the first day. The days seemed pointlessly stretched out, as if they were trying to meet some teaching hours requirement, and all the groups finished early, and at different times. On the final day my seminar leader even said that she thought it was repetitive and pointless :-/

The idea behind it was good, and the themes and ideas discussed will be of much use further on in my career, however, due to the delivery method of the week, most of it has gone in one ear and out the other. I did pick up useful ideas about leadership and quality management, and plan to read more on this as and when I have the time.

The assessment we've been given is helpful and does apply to the job hunting process people are currently, or will soon be engaging in. But considering the amount of knowledge we've gained, and the themes of the topic, compared to the time taken to 'teach' it and the time that feels wasted and the amount of other work I have to be done, the whole week does feel sort of pointless. I feel that if delivered differently it would have far more impact.

Friday:

Ahhh, Friday, my favourite day of the week.

We had a passionate lecture on Ethics, by the fantastic Jenny Butler, which was both interesting and insightful. It was both reaffirming things we all (should) know by now about HCPC registration, ethics and personal integrity, but it also covered other topics such as research ethics (non-maleficence, beneficence, justice & autonomy) which was a helpful reminder as these are elements covered by my research proposal.

The seminar we had covered prioritisation, which is an important skill and part of clinical reasoning. However, we were assigned a task to complete (taken verbatim from a band 5 job interview, which involved reading case studies and prioritising on an acute ward – Very useful & though provoking!) IN PREPARATION FOR THE SEMINAR, when we got there we were expected to do that task?! Someone hadn't planned that very well, so once again it felt a waste of time!

I then had a meeting with my dissertation supervisor, which was very positive, I received good constructive advise and left the meeting feeling capable and happy to continue on and submit another chapter by Monday. I plan to have all the chapters completed by the 12^th March, and to be ready to submit by the 19^th, allowing for contingency time as the final hand in date is the 22^nd at 12 mid day.

Almost there...

xx