Will you help us create communities where all members belong?

As a professional body, we have a long history of supporting communities to link up, learn and grow together – the good news is, you’re already part of ours!

As a member, you’re connected to a community of over 36,000 occupational therapists and supporters of our profession.

You have automatic membership to your local regional group, so you become part of your local community – able to network and share best practices with other OTs. These groups also promote, encourage and support the development and profile of our profession locally too.

You may also choose to join one of our Specialist Sections to support your continuing professional development (CPD) and network within those specific areas of practice. Specialist Sections are key to advising and influencing on our own and the profession’s behalf.

Both our regional groups and Specialist Sections are led by committees of dedicated volunteers, who identify and support their members’ needs and keep their communities up to date with community news and events.

Last year alone, our dedicated volunteers hosted over 300 events in person or online, offering members the opportunity to benefit from a range of CPD activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic taught us a lot about the value of communities and connections. We also increased our confidence and ability to use technology to help break down geographical restrictions and be able to network more readily.

Dr Nikki Daniels, our Head of Communities and Connections, explains that creating communities that can lift up every occupational therapist and support them to be the best they can be throughout their entire career is explicit within our strategic priorities.

'We’ve created our Communities and Connections team so we can optimise the value of bringing our members together in communities where they can share, learn with and from each other, seek support and guidance, innovate, build an evidence base, and create social and influential movements.

Although we’ve already got a fantastic community offer through our regional groups and our Specialist Sections, we know there are gaps. About 20% of members choose to join a Specialist Section. Anecdotally, we know that some members are not able to identify a community that is relevant to their practice, their professional development needs or their professional lives.

We want to improve our current community model to increase engagement, to make our communities more inclusive, more accessible and better able to respond to members’ expectations.'

Reflect back on the questions we asked at the top:

• What does a vibrant community look like?
• How would you plug into this community?
• What does it feel like to be part of this community?

These are questions we have already been asking volunteers in our current regional and Specialist Section communities.

At our bi-yearly Communities Forum meeting in May this year, Specialist Section Chairs and regional committee Vice-chairs came together to address committee and community business and to discuss the need for re-imagining our current communities model.

We also focused on what our communities should do and any key success factors we would need to consider.

As someone quite new to the Chair role, it was great to meet other volunteers at the forum. We had a really energetic conversation about the positive changes RCOT is making to focus on its members and build stronger opportunities for therapists to network and learn from one another, with a real spotlight on communities of practice.

The visioning workshop was exciting and inspiring to be a part of. It felt like the start of effective change with members’ needs at the heart, while developing the occupational therapy profession and bringing the professional body into the new era.

The vision of communities and connection came through strongly, with the paramount importance of community being a safe and inclusive place for all occupational therapists to share, grow and support one another, regardless of their professional or personal differences.

We gained several valuable insights from this first meeting and a key takeaway was that we need to consult more members.

Over the summer we rolled out the same workshop to full committees of volunteers from our Specialist Sections and regions.

These workshops revealed that current community volunteers prioritise:

• innovation
• inclusivity
• diversity in all areas
• creating an open and accessible community structure
• building a sharing environment
• opportunities for cross-community connections, collaboration and resource sharing.

Currently, they see technology as playing a key role in delivering all this, with an emphasis on continuous learning, modernisation and the exchange of knowledge – all building towards a feeling that they feel they belong.  

There is a need for greater diversity; this is essential for change. It isn’t easy to do this and there may be fear that it may not be quite right.

[We need to] be honest and say we can work together to create change; it won’t be perfect. It will be a new beginning and will open the doors to encouraging new members who will recognise others like themselves.