Involving service users in researching an acute physical inpatient occupational therapy service

2006 Conference

Cathy Robertson is an occupational therapist. She makes sure that people who have come into hospital for an operation, or because they are ill, can manage safely at home afterwards.

These people might not be in hospital for very long, and they might only see an occupational therapist a few times before they go home. This makes it difficult to involve them in research about the occupational therapy service.

This presentation is about how Cathy tried to involve people who had seen the occupational therapist in a research project to evaluate the service and make improvements. Cathy will talk about what she did, and her feelings about how it worked. She will describe how she tried to involve people in this project, and what they thought about their involvement.

Hopefully, by talking about what went well and what the problems were with this research, Cathy can get some ideas about better ways to involve people in the future.