#OTalk Tuesday 25th July 2023 8pm – Waiting – hosted by @chaniedavies and @anyadei

This week @chaniedavies and @anyadei are hosting an #OTalk

We’ve been waiting to do this #OTalk for over a year now! In writing our paper for Journal of Occupational Science, Understanding the Occupational Impact of Waiting using Occupational Science Concepts, we talked a lot about waiting… and really wanted to explore the topic with as many OTs and colleagues as possible, hence this OTalk!

The more we delved into the concept of waiting, and tried to use occupational science to understand it, the more questions we had! For the purpose of the article, we focused on the waiting that our patients do within the setting of healthcare (partly in due to the media headlined on this topic!), but we both shared many personal experiences of waiting with each other  through the process of creating the paper (including waiting for peer review!), that we really came to recognise how waiting is such an intrinsic part of our experiences as occupational beings.

Looking into the literature, there seems to have been a lack of curiosity exploring the impact of waiting – in particular with occupational science literature. Given its impact on occupational performance, roles and routines, and the link of these to health and wellbeing, it seemed we needed to use the power of occupational science to better understand this most human of experiences.

And fundamentally, turn this insight into ways to help people ‘wait well’, and minimise the impact of their occupations. For background, it might be helpful to read the full paper: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14427591.2023.2209781… Here is a sneak preview of the questions we are going to pose!