British Journal of Occupational Therapy

This article describes how an emancipatory research approach was used to explore the support needs of Pakistani families with disabled children in the United Kingdom. These families are among the most disadvantaged in the United Kingdom and research indicates that their needs tend to remain unmet through current services.

A participatory action research study was undertaken with six families. After an exploratory phase of individual interviews and activities, three action research groups were formed for women, men and non-disabled siblings respectively, in which they engaged in their own research activities. This increased their insight into their situation and enabled them to gain more control.

The study highlights the importance of family-centred practice when working with ethnic minority families. Key issues are continuity of intervention between school and home settings, facilitating communication within and with the family, and ensuring peer support for parents and siblings. An occupational science perspective indicates that a lack of belonging in their community affects the families' wellbeing, and that faith is an important, mostly positive, aspect of their sense of being.

The study affirms the importance of a family-centred and occupation-centred approach when working with families from diverse ethnic minority backgrounds.

The aim of this study was to understand the perspectives of mothers when mother and child both have sensory processing challenges, and how the mother's coping strategies for managing her sensory needs influence mothering co-occupations and parenting ideals.

Four mothers with sensory processing challenges participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using grounded theory principles.

Mothers described managing their sensory needs while negotiating the conflicting sensory preferences of their children. Coping strategies included understanding sensory processing patterns of behaviour and structuring daily activities and the environment. Some coping strategies had secondary consequences of a ripple effect, a reverberating impact that exacerbated the challenges of unmet sensory needs and interfered with co-occupations and parenting ideals.

Implications for mothers include understanding how their sensory processing transacts with their children's sensory preferences. Implications for practitioners include attending to the sensory processing patterns and coping strategies of both children and parents.

In a climate of overloaded health systems and limited opportunities for practice education, there is a need to provide high quality placements that prepare students adequately for contemporary practice. Group models of supervision are one way to address this. This study trialled a multiple mentoring (group supervision) model across three different settings: a university clinic, an acute hospital and a community-based service. The perceptions of practice educators regarding its use and essential implementation features of the model were explored.

The model was trialled over an 18-month period. A total of 15 practice educators participated in three focus groups.

Following inductive analysis, three main themes emerged: being clear in the chaos; qualities of the service and people; and challenges and benefits. Findings indicated a range of factors that influenced practice educators' experiences, including the structure of the placement, communication processes and the organisational context.

A multiple mentoring model of student supervision can be implemented across a range of practice settings, providing that care is taken to tailor the practicum for each setting. Practice educators perceived that the benefits to themselves, the students, the service and the clients outweighed the challenges.

Occupational therapists' intention of enabling women with rheumatoid arthritis to participate in everyday life is fraught with challenges in everyday practice.

Inspired by institutional ethnography, this paper aims to make explicit how the work of occupational therapists in an outpatient rheumatology hospital setting is governed within invisible, ruling relations. An analytical description of the first author's clinical experience was a standpoint from which to explicate how occupational therapy is coordinated to the ruling relations of the Austrian health care system.

Occupational therapy practice and research are ruled within a positivist, body-focused, medical apparatus, which renders largely invisible occupational therapists' knowledge of enabling people to engage in occupations that are meaningful to them.

Occupational therapists have professional power that can be asserted by strategically using occupational therapy specific knowledge and language in textually mediated practices, from assessments and case files to media images, to give greater visibility and influence to the profession's work of enabling occupation.

Person-centred approaches and service user involvement are integral to occupational therapy, but evidence is lacking about how occupational therapists working in the field of learning disabilities gather feedback from service users.

This research aimed to explore how members of the College of Occupational Therapists Specialist Section — People with Learning Disabilities gathered feedback from their service users. Questionnaires were completed by 70 occupational therapists and 12 of them participated in semi-structured interviews.

The occupational therapists were passionate about service user feedback, but they were likely to use informal methods rather than established methods with a more robust evidence base. Despite research indicating greater potential for bias when asking people with learning disabilities for feedback, almost half the participants did not take measures to reduce this. The interviews suggest that this is due to service pressures, lack of confidence and the complexity of service users' needs.

Occupational therapists need to do more to gain feedback from people with learning disabilities. Further research is required to establish the most effective way of doing this.