Next leadership event scheduled for 3 October 2018

As reported here recently, the 14^th February marked the soft launch of the Elizabeth Casson Trust’s Professional Leadership Programme.

It will be remembered that the Trust defines professional leadership as the ability to envision, articulate and clearly demonstrate by example the scope and benefits of occupational therapy to individuals and society as a whole thereby positively promulgating the profession to as wide an audience as possible. The requisite attributes of a leader have been identified as:

• Resilience
• Confidence
• Integrity
• Ability to Influence
• Ability to encourage progress and development
• Ability to create and sustain action
• Ability to be supportive and demonstrate supportiveness

The launch of the Programme took the form of an all day workshop between three of the Trust’s board members, Annie Turner (ECT Chair), Anne Lawson-Porter and Sally Townend, plus Caroline Waters (HR consultant) and 9 occupational therapists who had registered their particular interest in this key area. The purpose of the workshop was to identify common professional leadership issues and how to resolve them using a professional leadership framework being promulgated by the Trust.

The outcome of the workshop was the sharing and perfecting of a model to guide occupational therapist participants to determine a workplace issue using the leadership attributes identified at the workshop and then employ that model in a pilot bid process.

Following the pilot, lessons learned will be applied to the model in anticipation of occupational therapists being invited in the future to bid for funding in this crucial area. Such funding will be granted to the successful bidder via a process being run by the Trust. Apart from providing funding, the Trust’s assistance with completing the bid will also be available.

A workshop relating to the next round of the Professional Leadership Programme, details of which will be published over the ensuing weeks, is due to be held on the 3^rdOctober 2018.