Major new textbook edited by Salford lecturer to provide critical insight on disability and ableism

Bethan joined the University of Salford as Head of Occupational Therapy in March 2020, just as the first Covid lockdown hit. While it was a challenging time in many ways, she recalls feeling very welcome and supported as she joined the team.

Bethan began her academic career in 2002, when she first started teaching occupational therapy in Trinity College Dublin. She has also taught at Bournemouth University and the University of Liverpool. Her PhD was awarded in 2009 and her research was about disabled adults’ perceptions of choice and autonomy in everyday life.

“Occupational therapy is a wonderful profession,” she says. “It focuses on enabling people to do the things they want and need to do in everyday life.”

She explains: “Occupation comes from the Latin ‘occupatum’ - to be occupied with something or engrossed in it. Occupation, for occupational therapists, is far broader than work, it is anything that a person does throughout their lifespan that holds purpose and meaning for an individual person.

“The role of an occupational therapist is to find out what a person wants and needs to do, find out what the barriers are that make it difficult or impossible to do those things and then work on solutions. Solutions can be helping the person recover physical, cognitive or emotional skills, adapting the environment or modifying what is done. It sounds very simple, but there is a lot of theory and science in occupational therapy, which I find really stimulating.”

While Bethan's clinical experience spans care of the elderly, dementia services, stroke rehabilitation, rehabilitation of older people and working with younger people with physical disability, the profession itself is far broader, including physical and mental health, learning disability, physical and sensory disability and working with people of all ages.

“Occupational therapists can work with people whose daily lives are impacted by social, cultural or environmental factors that mean they can't do what they want and need to do. I love the breadth of the profession,” Bethan says.

Bethan was recently invited to be the European editor of a new major occupational therapy textbook, Human Occupation: Contemporary concepts and lifespan perspectives, just published by Routledge. This involved working with the editorial team to plan the contents of the book, recruiting authors for chapters, reviewing drafts of chapters, assigning peer reviews and working with the other editors from Australia, the USA and Canada to deliver the book. She was also an author on two chapters.

Bethan explains: “The book is new for occupational therapy because it brings together different perspectives about human occupation that students and therapists can use to underpin their work. Some of the chapters are critical and challenging and others pull together foundational knowledge in a way that is accessible to learners.

“I am particularly proud that, for the first time in a mainstream occupational therapy book, there is a specific chapter on critical disability studies perspectives and the impact of ableism on what people do in everyday life is included in several more chapters.”

Bethan continues: “I identify as a disabled person; I am blind and work a guide dog. This integration and understanding of perspectives as a person with lived experience of disability with a professional perspective is central to my teaching and research. There is still work to be done to enable equity for disabled people and a first step to equity involves people being aware of assumptions and barriers – we hope that this textbook will help make this a reality.”

Pictured below: Bethan holding a copy of the new textbook with Huntly, her guide dog, sat next to her