OTs recognised in the New Year Honours List
In the Queen's New Year Honours List, Professor Marion Walker, a College of Occupational Therapists’ Fellow, has been awarded an MBE while Shelagh Morris has been awarded a OBE.
Professor Walker is an Occupational Therapist and Professor in Stroke Rehabilitation at The University of Nottingham’s Division of Rehabilitation and Ageing. She became a Fellow of the College of Occupational Therapists in 2007 for pioneering a research culture within the profession.
“I burst out crying when I found out the news” said Marion “I’m totally gobsmacked by it – it’s totally unexpected and I’m absolutely thrilled. For me, it’s a reflection of the work that’s done here – not just by me, but all the stroke rehab research and occupational therapy here in Nottingham. You don’t get one of these awards just through your own efforts, it’s a team effort really.
What makes this really special is it was my patients who put me forward. They organised the whole thing – writing to various people, getting letters of support from my colleagues.”
Professor Walker started her professional life as an occupational therapist, qualifying in 1980 at the Glasgow College of Occupational Therapy and going on to become one of the first occupational therapists in the UK to be awarded a PhD. Her work was later recognised by her own peers when she was cited as one of the top 10 occupational therapists in the UK in the Independent on Sunday in 2002.
Shelagh Morris, Occupational Therapist and Allied Health Professions Officer at the Department of Health, is a committed member of the College of Occupational Therapists and a powerful advocate for the profession.
She was chair of Trent Regional Group for a number of years, and founder member of the Special Interest Group for OTs working with people with learning disability. Shelagh was also the chair of the COT Information Group when it was first established.She has worked closely with the College to highlight key areas of importance for Occupational Therapists including contributing to publications such as ‘Occupational Therapists in Adult Social Care in England (2008) and New Ways of Working for Allied Health Professions in Mental Health (2007).
Shelagh trained as an occupational therapist at the Liverpool School of Occupational Therapy (now part of Liverpool University and held a range of general management and leadership roles in the NHS, including joint working across health and social care and facilitating patient and service user involvement in improving and developing services.
Shelagh joined the Department of Health as Allied Health Professions Officer in April 2003. Her recent work has included self-referral to AHP services and service improvement in a range of AHP services including OT, speech and language therapy, physiotherapy and dietetics to reduce waiting times and improve access for patients.
As part of her work on the ‘Allied health professions prescribing and medicines supply mechanisms scoping project report’ (August 2009) Shelagh has been working with colleagues at COT to follow up a scoping project in 2009 and consider how supplementary prescribing might be used by OTs. At the College of Occupational Therapists’ Annual Conference in 2011, she led a session on the prescribing and management of medicines, exploring the benefits to patients when occupational therapists supplementary prescribe. More recently, she helped shape a new COT briefing paper on the ‘Safe management of medicines for Occupational Therapists’.
Julia Scott, Chief Executive of the College of Occupational Therapists, said of the awards: “My warm congratulations go out to both Marion and Shelagh for such well deserved honours. They continue to make an outstanding contribution to their respective fields, and we are extremely grateful to them for demonstrating the significant benefits of Occupational Therapy.”
