Visioning

Pushing boundaries with strength and leadership, courage and perseverance, personal integrity and purpose … .

Nazarian (2015)

As we celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the World Federation of Occupational Therapists, we make observations on the past and the future. Occupational therapists have been pushing boundaries since the inception of the Federation in 1952. For instance, through the World Federation, we were the first of the health care professions to establish an international recognition system for professional education programmes. Early in the development of the WFOT as a global entity, our forebears forged collaborative relations with the World Health Organisation, meaning we were at the forefront of the establishment of rights for all to health and wellness. The WFOT has provided leadership for its members through position papers, guidelines, global collaborations and learning opportunities. New learning opportunities exist in our coming WFOT Congress, to be held in Paris in August this year, and in the learning modules now available on the WFOT website (www.learning.wfot.org).

Recently, the WFOT has focused, among other areas, on disaster preparedness and response. For instance, a colleague and I recently completed the WFOT Manual on Disaster Preparedness and Risk Reduction (WFOT, in production). You may ask why another manual on disaster management, but you need only look at our changing global weather patterns and the resulting migration to find an answer. There is now much discussion around the world about climate migrants, the subject of the WFOT’s most recent online learning opportunity. Many more people are moving away from rural areas, as livelihoods become unsustainable. The prediction is that by 2050 about 70% of the world population will live in cities. Across the world, we are facing the prospect of increased numbers of both internal and cross-border migrations. And it is highly likely that larger communities —with their potential to offer housing, employment, safety, jobs, education, and health care access—will be the favoured destinations. According to the UN (World Urbanisation Prospects 2018), half of humanity—3.5 billion people—live in cities today; 5 billion people are projected to move away from rural areas by 2030. What can we, as occupational therapists and global citizens, do to support this inevitable migration? As visionaries, how do we see ourselves involved with this transformation in the future? Are we truly agents of change? And, if so, where do we start and how do we progress? Check out the leaning opportunities on learning.wfot.org

In this, the 70th Anniversary Year of the World Federation of Occupational Therapists, we look back and look forward. We may envision a better future, despite what we read in our news feeds, and consider how we can gain insights from the past. We could take our lead from our occupational therapy forebears, who had the courage to be change agents, and forerunners in development (see Platinum Anniversary – 70 years of Highlights and Influences of the World Federation of Occupational Therapists in this issue). We can look to the many contemporary visionary occupational therapists around the world, who have been catalysts for change; luminaries who have the strength, ingenuity and resilience to inspire us to embrace the possibilities for the future. We can contemplate the present and see how quickly we have adapted to changing circumstances in relation to the pandemic, what will remain of these changes and how we might incorporate change into our regular practice. We have read in past Bulletins, and again in this issue, the innovative approaches occupational therapists around the world have taken to incorporate new ideas into practice to deal with our present crisis (Barlow & Sullivan, 2022; Roosen et al., 2022).

We will take our learning into the future.