An Experiment in the use of Social Media in Clinical OT Practice: Growing Together (2) Putting down roots

I reflected in my earlier post about my experience with a Gardening project run within my NHS Foundation Trust, in which we used digital tools including Social Media in an innovative way to further the aims of the group.

I considered the difference between the natural social networks of our service users, family and friends, and the support from various agencies- health, the voluntary sector, the local authority and education. The division we practitioners placed between the providers and agencies seemed quite unnatural to the group members. The solution to this seemed to be to improve the communication channels within and between the various groups operating.

This post is part 2 in the series giving the whole story, and today it deals with the Intranet. We wished to connect the services within our Trust, and it occurred to me that in order to facilitate conversations within the Trust related to our groups, the Staff Intranet was a good place to start.

Luckily, within our Trust we have a very approachable and helpful Information Governance lead. Without his help and support, I would never have got the sign off to even begin this project, and so to him my thanks.

After consulting with the Information Governance lead, and obtaining his consent and guidance I was able to develop an Intranet site for our project. The site was built using Sharepoint, along with the rest of our staff Intranet. It focussed on shared resources, evidence and news about gardening groups within the Trust.

Populating the site with interesting and relevant content was surprisingly easy.  I visited some local projects  that were using gardening as a therapeutic intervention, to build links and to swap ideas around social inclusion, and possible future plans for collaboration- even discussing developing social enterprises. I added reviews of these other gardening groups and developing projects within the city to the embryonic site.

I added recipes which we were using with the produce we were growing, to be used by staff, or within our “Cook and Eat” groups. These were recipes I was inspired to come up with in response to the seasonality of food were were starting to produce, and which I was assiduously storing in the freezer in the Therapy kitchen for future group work.

I added a calendar of events to the page, so that other groups around the Trust knew when similar groups were running, so that they could inform potential participants. We had a news stream, to discuss plans for planting schedules.

Our network was growing- with this resource, I was able to develop links between the different services around the Trust. I visited some other sites to make them aware of the work, and developed close links with some of the other projects working in similar ways. Each project was developed into a sub-site, so that they had their own area to show off content they produced- which I anticipated would be photographs, news, and calendar events.

I added in contact details for individuals prepared to take a lead on the gardening projects in each area of the Trust and geographical areas of the city, so that there was a clear path to follow if viewers wished to refer people onto a suitable project in their locality.

I was still concerned that we weren’t able to respond to the request from our service users to enable them to share their progress within their natural social networks. I was also aware that our partner organisations within the Voluntary sector had no access to the resource on the Intranet that had been created.

Please see my next post for details of how the project progressed, where I took the skills and confidence developed though the use of Sharepoint and applied them to Social Media.

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