The Elizabeth Casson Trust will be awarding grants to occupational therapists to support the acquisition of profession-based leadership skills. The development of these skills can be accelerated if they are translated from theory into practice through application to a project, therefore the funding offered is up to £10,000 for the implementation of a service-based project.
Apply for the leadership programme
The Trust set about identifying the leadership needs of occupational therapists. This started in late 2016 with focus groups that included therapists from across the UK. Based on the themes that emerged, a programme began to take shape and the direction of this was tested at the Royal College of Occupational Therapists conference in 2017.
Since then, the Elizabeth Casson Trusts has continued to develop its programme and is working alongside the Royal College of Occupational Therapists so that each organisation can complement the other with the support it’s offering occupational therapists: the Royal College of Occupational Therapists has developed the Career Development Framework (2017) as a vehicle for identifying capability and future learning needs while the Elizabeth Casson Trust is concentrating on the development of leadership behaviours and skills.
The Elizabeth Casson Trust considers leadership within the profession to be 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".
To nurture leaders, the Trust aims to support the development of the potential and actual personal leadership attributes and capabilities of qualified occupational therapists, for example creativity, signposting, influencing, leading change, respecting and supporting others
Through this, occupational therapy professionals will have the confidence and commitment to own equal partner status within care teams and to set directions for developments to deliver quality services to current and future service users.
At our last Learning Event in October 2018, Caroline Waters discussed concepts around leadership and change and presented some models that can be used to guide us. Caroline has kindly written a blog for us to introduce these ideas and it can be found here.
There are many good resources available through formal institutions, in journals and on the web regarding leadership - in fact sometimes it feels there are so many it will take a great amount of time to sift through them. Therefore to get you started on your leadership journey we have done some scoping for you and categorised the resources for you, below.
Additionally, the Royal College of Occupational Therapists has resources available to members. Please log into the website and search Practice resources / Occupational therapy topics / Leadership and Management.
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