From classroom to community: Youth-led healthcare delivery
- Wits University
Vertical gardens by OT students provide meaningful activities for disabled people while addressing water scarcity and other rural gardening challenges.
The Department of Occupational Therapy (OT) at Wits has a long and proud history of student training and service delivery in rural Limpopo and Mpumalanga. OT is a founding member department of the Wits Rural Facility (WRF), where all the programme’s graduates since the 1980s to date have completed a Rural Fieldwork block. This pioneering undergraduate rural fieldwork programme has ensured that Wits OT students are conscious of the realities of living in such contexts and of the specific health needs of rural dwellers.
Sekororo Hospital is one of the Limpopo Province hospitals hosting Wits students for these fieldwork blocks. Students attend their Rural Fieldwork blocks and spend five consecutive weeks at their allocated placements where they are trained and supervised by occupational therapy clinicians.
Final year occupational therapy students Zoe Kahl and Kayla Kotzen have integrated their classroom learnings to lead grassroots engagements, developing themselves as allies in the communities they serve. “We use a bottom-up approach in our community-based rehabilitation. We find out what their problems are, what the core roots of that problem are, and then sit with the community and discuss how we can come up with solutions together and what the best solution will be,” says Kayla.
The Wits occupational therapy curriculum exposes the current generation of students to community development principles that focus on persons with disability, thus improving access to rehabilitation services for many rural communities. Students use the Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) approach to evaluate the needs of adult clients with disabilities. The community identified food insecurity as its most significant need, which had historically been compounded by intermittent water availability and local domestic animals destroying the crops.
“And so then we sat together and brainstormed and came up with the idea of a vertical garden that we made at this community centre that we were at,” she explains.
The students facilitated the clients’ development of a vertical water-wise food garden and provided therapeutic support for the project. The project allows People With Disabilities (PWDs) to engage in meaningful and productive activities, which gives them a sense of purpose and motivation.
“Occupations are the things we need to do, want to do and have to do in our daily lives,” adds Zoe, who says that this initiative also primarily helps people living with disabilities adapt and engage more fully in their lives. The project is going strong, and the vegetables are growing well.
Dr Jennie McAdam and Dr Lebogang Maseko, Wits Occupational Therapy Lecturers, say that despite the high cost of the rural fieldwork block, their department remains committed to “providing an authentic experience of rural rehabilitation for all our students”. The Rural Fieldwork block is currently one of five compulsory fieldwork blocks in the fourth (final) year of study.