Headway: ITU nursing

One day, maybe..

Part of Headway East London’s mission is to assist healthcare professionals in the training of their staff. Getting up close to survivors of brain injury, talking one-to-one, watching and listening is not something academic or technical training can easily offer. Nurses and therapists benefit greatly from the experience in many different ways, and as HEL day-service members we are happy to help.

Yesterday in a lecture theatre at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, we met ITU nurses studying at London South Bank University (LSBU): sixteen students and four HEL members. We sat in four groups of four, each for 20 minutes. We told them about our experience and answered their questions as best we can. It wasn’t easy because very few of us remember much of what happened in ITU. Most of us were unconscious and totally unaware of the nursing we got. What could we tell them? Not much.

But in some way that was OK. ITU nurses very rarely see the outcome of their work, so just to sit and chat and find out how life panned out for us after our brain injuries is enough. Several of the students raised this. Some even said they found it frustrating that they were never able to see what their work resulted in.

On this I tried to offer some crumbs of reassurance with examples from my own experience, of one nurse in particular who had somehow detected a spark of motivation in me and decided to kindle it into a bonfire. She tested my reactions endlessly and started some rudimentary exercises (finger drumming, mostly).

In this way, a habit was started almost in the moment after surgery. Four and a half years later and I still tap out tunes on the table top with my left hand. And it has advanced to learning simple piano chords with Izzy, the music co-ordinator at Headway East London. She wants me to master Wonderwall, but I never was much of an Oasis fan.

Headway: OT Students' Society, LSBU

Meet the ones who do

Billy Mann joins the fun-loving gang of OT students at London Southbank University for their annual conference

I was invited recently by Headway East London, where I am a member, to talk to students at London Southbank University (LSBU) about Occupational Therapy. OT is a thriving department at LSBU, so much so that the OT Students Society holds an annual event in which they all get together to discuss the current issues facing their chosen profession and invite guest speakers to contribute. That's where I came in. Headway East London has a longstanding buddy relationship with the university and conducts training seminars at which students get to talk directly with people who have experienced brain injury.

For my own comfort, I always try to make my contributions to these events simple. I am no expert in brain injury, and neither do I have ambitions to be so. I just tell the story of my stroke and the aftermath in the hope that it fuels questions, which I try to answer as best as I can. I enjoy the process most when I can persuade an expert to join in just in case I panic and start fluffing my lines. My partner at this gig was Headway East London Clinical Lead Amanda D'Souza, who also kindly projected some pictures on to a screen while I ran through my jibber-jabber.

I got some good questions from the LSBU students. They asked me how OTs had contributed to my recovery. They asked about the classic OT-physio tag-team partnership that prevails. I said in my case it worked best as a threesome, OT-physio-patientclientserviceuserorwhatever, where we all fed off each other to advance the therapy. This, I said, could only have happened if we trusted one another. Happily, we did.

The title of this event was The Power of Occupation, its subtitle "maintaining professional identity in the face of change". I detected from this and from some of the questions that all was not happy in the land of OT, that they were feeling neglected and undervalued as professionals.

This was not exactly a shock to me, but from the impressive display of organisation and attendance I was seeing today, I was surprised the LSBU students were struggling for status and recognition. It seemed to me like they were at the top of their game, and embracing it all with relish. Four years earlier, when I was in the neuro-rehab unit at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN) in Queen Square, London, my OT had told me that Occupational Therapy was misunderstood and its therapists unsure of their identity within the nhs. OT is a broad church, covering a large area from behavioural OT to hardline neuro. I mused to the LSBU students that one day new names for jobs might need to be invented. I don't think this offered them any comfort, and nor did my pronouncement that after a conversation one day with Headway East London OT Natasha Lockyer, I had come to define OT as a subspecies of Anthropology or Ethnography. I saw it as "the science of how we do things".

I had started my talk by telling the students that earlier in the day I had bumped into a neighbour, a head teacher at a special needs school, and told her that later I would be talking to OT students. "Ohh, I love OTs," she said, "and they make the best managers ever." This was a positive start and I'd tried to find a catchy soundbite to finish my talk, but as the endpoint neared, "Everyday OT is the key" started to sound flimsy, so I told them how my wife uses OT to get me to do chores. When she wants me to do things like set the dining table or empty the washing machine, she finishes her request with "It's good OT". I have a feeling she could be right about that.