F E AT U R E
Creativity and transdisciplinary practice in aged care Renelle Harrison, Occupational Therapist
O
ccupational therapy is an innately creative profession. Our vibrant history is firmly steeped in the arts and crafts movement, with origins in the use of basket weaving and leatherwork as a means of rehabilitation and well-being. Of course, as the body of professional knowledge and evidence has continued to grow, so, too, have the frameworks and approaches to practice.
Contemporary practice – where do we fit?
Fast forward to present day, and we can see an evolution of the profession as we emphasised the biomedical approach, expanded horizons in recovery and mental health practice, and employed the principles of occupational therapy more broadly in the context of rehabilitation. Occupational therapy now encompasses a wide range of models, frameworks and theoretical approaches. Practically, the profession is also further enriched by the breadth of interests and experiences held by this magical breed of practitioners. Today we see occupational therapists in a vast array of health and community settings – and yet while we appear to be almost everywhere, it sometimes seems as if we don’t really fit anywhere. Such has been my own professional struggle of late. After the exciting new 34 otaus.com.au
graduate years, I took up a series of roles in community and hospital settings and eventually landed in aged care.
What does OT mean anyway?
While I have always loved my clients and work, I have often felt that institutional environments placed various constraints that prevented me from fully outworking my occupational therapy principles and ideals. In other words, the ideal has been continually sacrificed on the altar of practicality. In my aged care role, I have focused on pain management, as well as working with an allied health assistant to create and implement programs based on cognitive stimulation therapy for residents with dementia. In the course of my CPD, I was happy to see the overwhelming body of evidence in relation to the benefits of creativity and facilitating the older person to cultivate their own creative practice as a key aspect of healthy ageing. It became apparent to me that the creative process in and of itself held validity as an intervention for improving occupational performance. The creative process itself, regardless of the end product, brings together elements of self-care and self-attentiveness, cognitive stimulation, biofeedback, motor and sensory components, rest and leisure, a sense of agency with strong interpersonal links and connection to our physical and cultural
environments. The creative process helps us gain a sense of the world and our place in it – even touching on aspects of our spiritual being, an element of our theoretical approach as occupational therapists that often seems all too difficult to articulate in the reality of everyday practice, especially in aged care. With all the evidence and the obvious clinical benefits, why wasn’t I seeing more of this targeted and specific intervention in residential aged care? I started to long for ways to reconnect with the origins of our profession; rediscovering what we have known all along, but reappropriating our rich heritage for contemporary practice. And I wondered: what does occupational therapy really mean to me in this context?
Exploring transdisciplinary practice
This line of thinking and questioning drove me back to my roots in undergraduate study, where I drew on the concept of transdisciplinary practice. As occupational therapists, we’re very familiar with the idea of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary practice, but for me, transdisciplinary practice had been something left firmly in the textbooks. “Transdisciplinarity integrates the natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, and transcends their traditional
