Founder Statement

I’ve been working as an occupational therapist within the field of mental heath for the past twenty years. I completed a BSc Honours degree in Combined Studies majoring in Psychology in 1989 at Hertford University. It took me several years after this before I discovered the discipline of occupational therapy and fell in love with it. I undertook my occupational therapy degree as a mature student enrolling in the fast-track postgraduate degree at Colchester Institute in 2004.

This fast-track degree meant that instead of the usual rate of three years the degree was completed at an accelerated rate in two years. This was very intensive and at the same time, within a few weeks of beginning the course, my partner became unwell with a chronic and debilitating illness.
I began to learn, through my coursework and my own personal experience, how to deliver a high level of performance under very stressful and limited conditions. Key to this was setting up the right conditions for me to work in and maintaining a balance between work and relaxation that allowed my productivity to be high whenever I did sit down to work. I learned that short periods of work do accumulate and do deliver results. I learned to get organised and to focus and to build on previous work in the most effective way. I learned to be pragmatic and let go of perfectionism. And I completed the course with a 2.1 BSc Honours degree.

This knowledge stood me in good stead when I went on to work in the psychosis service in Cambridgeshire NHS. There were significant numbers of students coming into the service who had become unwell due to the level of stress that they were experiencing whilst studying.

It was then that I realised that my previous experience and my occupational therapy training were very effective in supporting students. These students were navigating big areas of their lives such as how to push themselves but not overdo it and become ill again, how to socialise but manage alcohol and maintain their medication routines, what to say to other people including friends and teachers, how to ask for help and how to focus and concentrate when their mind wasn’t working as it had previously. These students needed concrete strategies for setting balanced routines, they needed very effective academic strategies and they needed to manage their beliefs about themselves and their capabilities.

Whilst these issues were critical for these particular students, they are issues that all students face. Wellbeing, mental health, stress, productivity, time management and self-belief are universal issues. I realised that my personal experience and my training filled a very particular gap in what is usually on offer within schools and universities. The focus is on performance and in this way it removes the stigma of wellbeing and health. These are aspects of achieving high performance. This process mirrors the supervision which I must have to maintain my professional registration. I want the service to look like an obvious extra benefit that any student would want to add to their skill set.

I love what I do and because it is so specialist I have started to create training courses to share my approach with other support staff and for students to use directly if this way of working suits them best.

Lee Parker, Occupational Therapist