My name is Doris Fischer, and I have been working as an Occupational Therapist at Walkergate Park for the past 16 years.

For many years, I have been promoting the use of the occupational therapy specific assessment and intervention tool ‘Perceive, Recall, Plan and Perform System of Task Analysis’ or PRPP for short. I have always been an avid user of the PRPP, ever since undergoing the training course back in 2003, when I was still living and working in Austria. When I moved to the UK shortly after, I was disappointed to find out that the PRPP was not very well known here.

To raise the profile of the PRPP in the UK, since 2016 I have organised PRPP courses at Walkergate Park. Our next course is planned for Autumn this year.

During the 5-day training course, we would need to use videos of service users that are performing daily living tasks they might find difficult. I was wondering whether you would be able to support this endeavour by volunteering your time to be filmed?

Background

PRPP has been developed by Judy Ranka and Chris Chapparo in Australia. It enables occupational therapists to observe service users during everyday tasks they find difficult to perform, and to determine their ability to use cognitive strategies during their task performance. The structured approach of the PRPP helps to gain a deeper understanding of an individual’s difficulties and how to go about planning interventions that are more specifically tailored to their needs. I have presented this tool during two national conferences (UK Stroke Forum in 2019 and the Specialist Section Neurological Practice conference in 2021).

As it is not feasible for Judy and Chris to keep coming to the UK from Australia to teach all the time, they approached myself and two other occupational therapists (Sarah de Charentenay from King’s Hospital in London & Alison Bragg from the Oxford Enablement Centre) to ask whether we would like to become UK based instructors of the PRPP tool.

We agreed that we would like to do this, as all three of us feel very passionate about the PRPP. It is difficult logistically to provide a training package together when the three of us are not working for the same hospital trust, so we are going to offer the training courses in a private capacity. Although that doesn’t mean that we are going to give up our day jobs!

By offering to be filmed performing an everyday task,  we can build up a library of video resources that will help us to train occupational therapists to use the PRPP tool and better support their patients to make progress in their rehabilitation.

If you are interested in being involved, please email Jo who will put you in touch with Doris for further information.