Occupational Therapy Week 2025: Meet Kadie Taylor
We’re celebrating Occupational Therapy (OT) Week (3-9 November) and this year’s theme is ‘Right support, right time: Unlocking the power of OT’ – with a focus on prevention and early intervention.
As part of the week, we’re sharing stories about our fantastic occupational therapists within the Trust and how they make a difference every day.
Hello my name is… Kadie Taylor
I work in… the Kirklees and Calderdale child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) assertive outreach team.
Our service is part of the Crisis team, we support young people who experience moderate to severe mental health difficulties. These young people may experience significant impact to their functioning across their activities of daily living (ADL) including education, social skills, self care tasks and leisure. We enable people to access CAMHS who may have difficulty with engaging in mainstream services, by being adaptable and using a flexible approach.
How my role supports the shift to prevention and early intervention… The occupational therapy role helps young people to regain skills and functioning in meaningful activities and tasks which matter to them. We work in partnership with other services to ensure their needs are met. We can reduce crisis episodes or need for crisis intervention by improving access to mainstream services and completing work to mitigate risk in the community, which involves safety planning and care co-ordination. We also support young people to function and engage in occupation, which supports their wellbeing, routines and roles, and participation in their activities of daily living.
An example of someone I have recently worked with and has benefited from occupational therapy… I recently supported a young person who wasn’t attending school and had not left their room in several months. They had stopped completing their activities of daily living, including self care. We started with SMART visual goals which was informed by an occupational self assessment. The young person identified a barrier to going outside was their appearance and that showering was important to them but they had little motivation to do this.
We did a piece of work around motivation – and having a motivator enabling them to shower e.g. going outside to do something they previously would enjoy. They worked towards weekly short term goals to shower and we then worked towards completing graded exposure sessions in our OT sessions. This included going out in the car initially, then going to a park, then going into a shop to practice social skills. During our OT sessions, they had tried a climbing wall activity and would now like to do this as a hobby. We supported them with an education health and care plan (EHCP) which was accepted and a suitable provision has been sourced for them to return to education. As they had completed graded exposure and ADL routine work, they now feel more confident in returning to education.
Thank you Kadie for everything you and our occupational therapists do to make the lives of the people in our care better.
