Valuing Our Vision: Kelly Spreads the Word
Kelly Edwards a newly qualified Occupational Therapist in Trafford attended SeeAbility’s ‘Valuing Our Vision’ Conference and shared her new knowledge with her colleagues.
Kelly has been interested in sight loss and people with learning disabilities since she started training to become an occupational therapist. She explains, “I worked within a specialist college with someone who had sight problems and through working with him first found out about Functional Vision Assessments (FVA).” Her interest in helping people live a fulfilling life as independently as possible, and make the most of their vision, meant that when she read about SeeAbility’s Valuing our Vision Conference focusing on the vision needs of people with learning disabilities it got her attention right away.
Kelly attended the day, and says, “All of the presentations gave good ideas to consider and do. I got something out of every one!
In particular, I really liked David Jones speaking about cognitive visual impairment – I hadn’t known much about it before. I have talked about it with colleagues since who support people that the information is relevant to. People can be considered to have challenging behaviour, but it could be related to some of the factors he listed. There was a case study in one of the workshops about a man with Down’s Syndrome who had a stroke: it was really good to learn how the rehabilitation and independent living teams had worked with him over three years and to see the progress he had made.
Because of my interest in Functional Vision Assessment (FVA), I went to that workshop: it really showed me how to look at people’s behavior and relate that to what they might be able to see. I’ll be using it more in my practice when I am assessing people in my role as an OT. I picked up the ‘You and Eye’ DVD from SeeAbility which gave me another useful resource to take back.”
Returning to work, Kelly compiled all the information she had learnt from the conference into an extensive report to share with colleagues. She says, “I took my findings to an OT study day and spoke about the event where I explained FVA to colleagues. I also did the same with our community team which includes a physiotherapist, a nurse, a speech and language therapist and a psychologist. I shared the SeeAbility and Look Up websites with the teams so they now know where to go for more information. My colleagues were really impressed with the idea of FVA and are looking at how to incorporate it into their own assessments. Everyone now has a copy of the FVA worksheet which I got from the Conference. Since sharing it with the health team I’ve also had social workers come and request it from me.”
“I will now use what I have learnt in initial assessments to pick up sight problems and I will continue to spread the word and share this important information with carers and support workers.”