Occupational therapist at East of England Community Health and Care NHS Trust

The job at East of England Community Health and Care NHS Trust

Occupational therapists help people do the everyday activities that matter to them when illness, injury, disability or ageing gets in the way. They assess what someone needs and wants to do, then grade tasks, teach new techniques, recommend equipment and adaptations and change the environment so the activity becomes possible again. Work ranges from discharge planning and home visits on an acute ward to hand therapy, mental health recovery groups, school-based paediatrics, vocational rehabilitation and social services housing assessments. People of all ages recovering from surgery, stroke or injury, and people living with mental illness, learning disability, dementia, long-term conditions or physical disability who want to live more independently.

At a community trust such as East of England Community Health and Care NHS Trust, that work means a community caseload — people seen in their own homes, in care homes, in health centres and in community hospitals, organised around a geographical patch rather than a ward. Community posts give you more autonomy earlier — your own diary, your own decisions in someone’s front room — and usually require a driving licence and a car. Across the profession as a whole, occupational therapists work in settings including NHS acute trust, community rehabilitation team, NHS mental health trust, social services and local authority and schools and children's services — an organisation of this type will run some of those services and not others, which is why two posts with the same job title in the same city can be very different jobs.

Pay is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so East of England Community Health and Care NHS Trust pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in England pays it: £32,073 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. For context, median full-time pay across all occupations in the East of England was £38,597 in 2025. What genuinely differs between two employers is the caseload, how rotations are structured, how much protected time you get for supervision and continuing professional development, how much band 6 progression is built into the establishment, and how far you travel between sites. Those are the questions worth asking at interview.