I am a former child. It gives me empathy. Whenever I see a boy get a bagful of homework, I recognise that sigh.
I am an ex-patient. Though the trauma happened a long time ago, the memory is still raw. If I hear the whirr of a dentist’s drill, BANG, I’m back in the chair.
My first job was in Tesco. People would ask me, “What’s a good brandy?” and I would mumble, “Dunno”. I was just a boy. A good Cognac cost more than I earned in a week.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It gives a sense of perspective, an opportunity to look back on our journey from the viewpoint of a veteran. We chart our lives as a series of milestones, forged by failure and resilience and to look back and celebrate that is a privilege. Our wisdom is hard-earned.
The point of this project is to create a wellbeing resource. Our market is very niche: Occupational Therapists in their first year of work. What has surprised me, during this process, is how many people outside this group, have taken an interest in our work. We get responses from students, retired OT’s and clinicians all over the world. While our core task is to support Year One OT’s these other voices intrigue.
We have spent many weeks harvesting opinions as to how we can help. While we collate and compress this plethora of voices into one wellbeing resource, our blogging platform will be vacant. During this brief interim period, we are offering this popular platform to you, so if you have a story relevant to the first year in practice that you’d like to tell, get in touch. Guest blogs must be OT-related, from a wellbeing perspective, but other than that, we’re open to suggestions.
If you’d like to GUEST BLOG on our site, our contact details are below:
- Email: year.one.ot@gmail.com
This project is funded by the Elizabeth Casson Trust. If you’d like to learn more about the project you can do so via this link and the team behind it here.
Written by Rob Young