Dr Anita Hamilton | UniSC | University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Anita Hamilton has over 25 years’ experience as an occupational therapy practitioner and educator. As a clinician, she worked in acute and community mental health, work rehabilitation and in an acute surgical hospital specialising in orthopaedic and neurological conditions.

Anita joined the occupational therapy team at UniSC in 2012 after spending five years teaching at the University of Alberta in Canada. Prior to that she taught at Deakin University in Victoria.

For over ten years Anita has had a very strong interest in digital literacy and its important link with knowledge creation and translation, and digital technology and health. She has been a champion in the adoption of digital technologies in occupational therapy education. Anita’s current focus is in the areas of near-peer student mentoring and professional ePortfolios. Digital health is another area of interest; while in Canada Anita was the primary investigator of research looking at the safe use of social media by people with acquired brain injury, and in 2018 she is leading research looking at supporting well-being in a “tech saturated” world.

Due to her interest in digital literacy in the OT profession, Anita became one of the co-founders of OT4OT, an online group whose aim was to advance the use of online technologies for occupational therapy for professional development, research, and practice. OT4OT began in 2010 and has spawned over 60 ‘4OT’ groups with 96,000+ members across the network and which is now facilitated by a vibrant online community. OT4OT is also the Word Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT) Executive Project Team - Social Media and wrote the WFOT position statement on Social Media.

Another important and growing research interest is the impact of assistance dogs on participation in meaningful occupations, Anita has completed research with Young Diggers Dog Squad, Smart Pups and Dogs with Wings (Canada) so far.