The new work station room at NPC

The barrier we picked up at Newlands Park Centre was a lack of vocational rehabilitation training. Many of the service users experience occupational deprivation due to them not having a job or being in a job that does not satisfy their needs or intellectual level due to them not having the opportunities to study or gain skills in life. We decided to do a vocational rehabilitation centre.... Often the service users, come into the facility, with a poor quality of life, they have no job, have lost their job or don’t gain anything in their line of work which is not fulfilling. They often land up, getting in a cycle of substance abuse, as they have no purpose in life, no skills and little to look forward to. When they come to the rehabilitation, yes they are clean for 3 months, but they then return without skill, and can easily return to relapse, by providing them with a skill or developing an interest in that section, the service user can now go out and apply for jobs, that are in the line of work that they are interested in. So besides leaving being clean, they can also leave with a sense of hope, exposure to a new skill. In our vocational rehabilitation centre, we have 4 main sttaions- welding, electrical, mechanical and a bicycle repair station. These stations all have a set of skills that the service user can take into the world outside of the rehab. When we were practising each station with the service users to see if it would work, one of the service users said he knows nothing about engines as that was the station we asked him to do one of the activities. afterwards, he said- "Wow, i actually learnt something today." So that was a great feeling for all the students. It has been a very stressful and long semester putting this project together but it has been so rewarding! To see all our stations up and running and to see the service users getting so involved with the stations was so great. We look so forward to this project benefitting so many service users in the future. This project has added a whole new element to their quality of life.