This Year 2, 20‑credit module is the final module in the Occupation for Health and Wellbeing theme. The module enhances students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, and professional reasoning by enabling them to critically explore societal, environmental, policy, and systemic influences on occupational participation for marginalised and complex populations who experience occupational injustice. Students apply their understanding of occupational therapy best practice nationally and internationally to the design and implementation of ethical, occupation‑focused innovations, which may include direct interventions or occupation‑focused service improvements that address complex health needs and occupational patterns.
Students will reflect on the unique contribution of occupational therapy to service provision and consider innovative, entrepreneurial, and co‑productive approaches to innovation design, implementation planning, and leadership. They will identify and apply concepts of quality assurance, sustainable innovation, and change management within their proposed designs, and demonstrate how these are relevant to leading change in contemporary practice contexts.
Through critically analysing the wider context of service provision, students will propose an approach to improve occupational participation and well‑being for a population of their choice. Learning culminates in a defended presentation, where students pitch and justify their proposed innovation and implementation strategy, demonstrating professional reasoning, adaptive problem‑solving, and readiness for future occupational therapy practice.
There are two assessment components within this module.
Assessment 1 is a defended occupational innovation presentation – students pitch and justify their proposed innovation or service improvement, demonstrating critical analysis of population needs, co-production, leadership, entrepreneurial thinking, implementation planning, sustainability, and alignment with occupational therapy values and professional standards. This assessment must be passed and has 100% weighting.
Assessment 2: Seven-week role-emerging practice placement (PP3) – Competency-based continuous assessment; 0% weighting but must be passed