Finding her professional voice: Jessica’s Occupational Therapy journey at LSBU
Jessica Hare joined LSBU in 2022 as part of the university’s first cohort of Occupational Therapy degree apprentices. Already working as a rehabilitation support worker, she balanced her apprenticeship with her NHS role and life as a parent. Four years later, Jessica graduated with First Class Honours and began her career as a qualified Occupational Therapist. Here, she shares how her time at LSBU helped her develop her skills, confidence and professional voice.
What made LSBU the right next step for you?
At the beginning of 2022, I was working as a rehab support worker in the community employed by Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, blending a mix of nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy skills and knowledge to support patients to remain safe and independent in their own homes. I had one daughter who had just started at primary school, and another in her final year of preschool.
When the apprenticeship was advertised for a September start, it felt like a natural step to take - going back to school at the same time as my younger daughter starting primary school. I joined as part of LSBU’s first cohort of Occupational Therapy degree apprentices, which meant we were all navigating a relatively new route into the profession together. It was also the first time that Frimley Health had supported an OT apprenticeship, so I was navigating a new system at work as well.
The apprenticeship offered an incredible opportunity, but it also meant balancing several different roles at once: employee, apprentice, university student and parent. I came to university with practical healthcare experience and a strong interest in people and what matters to them, but I didn’t necessarily arrive with the same confidence in myself academically or professionally.
Over the four years, I had to learn not only the knowledge and skills required to become an OT, but how to balance those different parts of my life and recognise that my existing experiences were something I could bring to my learning rather than something separate from it.
How did LSBU help you grow beyond your original career ambitions?
At the beginning, my ambition was fairly straightforward: I wanted to qualify as an Occupational Therapist.
As the course progressed, that changed. I became increasingly interested not only in what we could do for an individual patient, but in the wider systems surrounding them. I started noticing barriers, asking why things were done in particular ways and thinking about whether services could work differently.
One of my biggest personal challenges was developing confidence in my own professional reasoning. I could often identify a problem or have an idea, but learning to trust that thinking, articulate it and be prepared to respectfully challenge established practice was another step entirely. (It’s a bit like showing your ‘workings out’ in maths - I never found that easy either!)
I gradually realised that becoming an OT wasn’t about reaching a point where I knew all the answers. It was about learning how to ask good questions, use evidence, reflect on my practice and remain curious.
What’s the value of learning at LSBU while gaining real clinical experience?
The integrated nature of the degree apprenticeship was particularly valuable because university learning and clinical practice constantly informed one another.
LSBU gave me the theoretical foundations behind what I was seeing in practice, while placements allowed me to experience Occupational Therapy across different settings and with different patient groups. Academic work encouraged me to look beyond the immediate clinical situation and consider evidence, occupational justice, professional identity, service development and the wider factors influencing people’s health and participation.
Being part of the first OT apprenticeship cohort also meant that there was a strong element of learning as we went. That experience helped me become more comfortable with uncertainty and with speaking up when something needed clarification or change.
To complement academic studies, I had opportunities with LSBU outside the classroom environment. I volunteered as a course board representative for two years, giving me an opportunity to provide essential feedback from the first cohort of OT apprentices to the university and see real changes happen. I also visited parliament and represented LSBU at an apprenticeship fair.
How did your LSBU placements show you what Occupational Therapy is really about?
Throughout the apprenticeship I worked within NHS community and inpatient therapy services and completed placements across a variety of clinical environments which included older adults, community, inpatient mental health, schools based practice, and my final placement was within specialist palliative care, which had a particularly significant impact on my understanding of meaningful occupation.
It reinforced that Occupational Therapy isn’t always about making somebody more independent or achieving conventional rehabilitation goals. Sometimes our role is about enabling somebody to do something that matters to them, maintaining identity and choice, or adapting an environment so that a person can participate in life in whatever way remains possible.
My academic work also increasingly connected with issues I was encountering in practice. For a final-year assignment, I explored Occupational Therapists’ experiences of equipment availability and its impact on patient outcomes. What began as something I had noticed in everyday clinical practice developed into a survey-based quality-improvement project exploring how differences in equipment provision could affect rehabilitation, care needs and hospital discharge.
That experience helped develop my interest in quality improvement and showed me that Occupational Therapists can influence systems as well as individual patient care.
What opportunities at LSBU helped you grow beyond your studies?
The biggest change during my time at LSBU was probably learning to trust my own thinking and finding my professional voice.
There were some important milestones along the way. In 2024, I was named Apprentice of the Year by my employer, which was particularly meaningful because it provided recognition at a time when I didn’t necessarily always recognise my own progress.
I also wrote a reflection, Keeping My Hats On, about my experience of navigating the different roles and identities involved in being an apprentice. Having that reflection published was another important moment for me. Something that had begun as an honest reflection on my own experience became something that could potentially resonate with other learners.
Over time, I became more willing to ask questions, contribute ideas, present my work and explain the reasoning behind my clinical decisions. I also became more comfortable acknowledging what I didn’t know and asking for support when I needed it.
Perhaps most importantly, I learnt that confidence doesn’t necessarily arrive before you do something difficult. Quite often, you have to do the difficult thing first and discover afterwards that you were capable of it.
By the end of the course, I wasn’t simply trying to prove that I could become an Occupational Therapist anymore. I was beginning to think about what kind of Occupational Therapist I wanted to be.
What are you doing now?
I completed my degree in 2026 and graduated with First Class Honours.
I then moved to Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to work within community inpatient rehabilitation, beginning the transition from apprentice to qualified professional.
I’m still at the beginning of my OT career, and there is an enormous amount I want to learn. However, I’m particularly interested in rehabilitation, quality improvement, service development and how Occupational Therapy can help identify and address barriers that might otherwise be accepted as simply “the way things are”.
Coming back to LSBU as an alumna feels slightly surreal when university life is still so recent, but it also gives me an opportunity to look back at the person who started the apprenticeship four years ago and recognise how much changed along the way.
What advice would you have for someone studying at LSBU?
Don’t wait until you feel completely confident before putting yourself forward.
Say yes to opportunities that interest you. Ask questions. Talk to people working in areas you want to know more about. Share an idea even if it isn’t completely formed yet. Take feedback, reflect on it and keep going.
Don’t assume that everybody else feels more capable than you because they appear confident, either. University is somewhere you are supposed to be learning; you aren’t expected to arrive already knowing how to do everything.
And don’t underestimate the experiences you bring with you. Whether those come from previous employment, placements, family life, volunteering, challenges you’ve experienced or something completely unrelated to your degree, they can all influence the professional you become.
You don’t need to graduate knowing everything. What matters is leaving university knowing how to keep learning, how to think critically, how to recognise when you need help and, perhaps most importantly, beginning to trust your own professional voice.