Bedside Reading Georgia Vine: Occupational Therapy, Disability Activism and Me
I'm really pleased today to be welcoming Georgia Vine to Bedside Reading. Georgia is an OT and is the author of Occupational Therapy, Disability Activism and Me, Challenging Ableism in Healthcare, which is a bit of a mouthful of a title for a very slim and absolutely brilliant, brilliant book.
Georgia is an OT, she is an educator at the University of Huddersfield and she also is disabled. She has cerebral palsy and this book is based on her own experiences through the education system, higher education, occupational therapy training, and the enormous hurdles which she had to leap over in order to become registered with the health professionals regulatory body, and which absolutely astonished me because I thought that the health service might have moved on somewhat in its ableist attitudes.
Georgia's blog is here https://notsoterriblepalsy.com/
Georgia reassures me during the course of the podcast that perhaps things have got better. I really hope they have. and with activists like her flying the flag, perhaps the world of healthcare is going to become even better at supporting students and staff who have disabilities, but also have so much to offer and so much insight into the system.
Georgia is obviously incredibly talented. She is so, so wise and insightful drawing on her own experiences and experiences beyond what you might expect somebody in their 20s to have experienced, presumably as a result of her own disability.
I absolutely love the book. It's really challenged me as an educator. It's really challenged me as a doctor and in a good way and to really, really think about what people can do and to start adopting a much, much more strengths-based framework in everything that I do in supporting my learners. So I'm hugely grateful to Georgia for writing it, and it was a real pleasure to talk to her about it.
Find Georgia on instagram here https://www.instagram.com/notsoterriblepalsy