Meet Amy, who works alongside occupational therapists to help ill, injured or elderly people to be as independent as possible. Part of our Bitesize world of work series.
Hi, my name's Amy, I'm from Oldham in Greater Manchester and I'm an occupational therapy technical instructor.
Occupational therapy in our department is, it's our responsibility to assess the functioning of patients that get referred to us. So, we look at things like fine motor skills, which is anything that we do with our hands and fingers, so, fastening buttons, using a pen or a spoon. We also look at gross motor skills, so that's how somebody walks, if they can climb stairs, if they have any balance issues, and we then tailor a treatment plan to those individuals, so that we can help them to live as independently as possible.
About three years ago, I became unwell myself with my mental health and I had a lot of input from an occupational therapy team and, before then, I didn't have any idea what occupational therapy was and I saw just how amazing the treatment had done for me, so I thought, you know, it's been a huge positive impact on my own recovery, I'm going to have a look into everything that they do. So, I did a bit of research, had a look into occupational therapy and then I actually looked at volunteering within an occupational therapy team and worked within the one that actually looked after me and I just fell in love with it from there and it was, yeah, I just… everything about it, I just thought this is an amazing role and then I went on from volunteering to getting the paid role as an occupational therapy technical instructor.
My GCSEs that I took while I was at school was Art, Drama and Media Studies and then I went onto college to do Media Production Technology because I always wanted to be a film director from being about 12-years-old and I was still following that pathway at those ages as well so I picked those to help me get into film technology – things I didn't really think played a part in the role that I have now but they definitely do because to be within our team, you need to have a very creative side so it really helped me with my creative side anyway.
When you're going through school, you'll always be told that you need your Maths and English and a lot of us at school used to always think: "when am I going to use maths? When am I going to use English">