One of the best things about being the president of AOTA is working with our Board of Directors. AOTA members are familiar with the voting board members, because you elected us (go to http://www.aota.org/Governance/BOD/40495.aspx for a list of current board members). But in addition to AOTA Executive Director Frederick P. Somers, the Board has two other members with a voice but no vote: Consumer Advisor Sudip Bose, MD, FACEP, FAAEM; and Public Advisor Susan Parker, MSW/MSP.
Sudip Bose was the keynote speaker at AOTA’s Annual Conference & Expo in Orlando last year. He is an emergency room physician in Odessa, Texas, and a former major in the U. S. Army. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Dr. Bose served as a physician on the front lines of combat. His experiences ranged from treating Saddam Hussein, to caring for wounded soldiers and civilians while under attack, to earning the Bronze Star. As the sole doctor for a mobilized infantry unit, Dr. Bose provided emergency care in the streets of Baghdad, Najaf, and Fallujah and took care of thousands of American soldiers and Iraqis.
Since 2005, Dr. Bose has been raising awareness and funding for wounded veterans, particularly those with posttraumatic stress disorder and the need for assistance in community reintegration. His experience in the war-zone hospitals caring for those with catastrophic injuries has convinced him of how important it is for the public to understand the unique and critical contribution occupational therapy makes to health care. As a Board member, he has eagerly assisted in media coverage of occupational therapy by providing a physician’s view of the role and advantages of having occupational therapy practitioners on health care teams, particularly following the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Dr. Bose believes in the power of social media to spread the word, and, as he puts it, he wants our stories to go “viral”.
We are also so fortunate to have Susan Parker serving on our Board. Her career came into focus in 1974. At that time the VA didn’t acknowledge posttraumatic stress disorder as service-related difficulty, so Vietnam veterans having trouble adjusting were coming to the community health center where she was working in Orange County, Vermont. That she cared about this gap resonates with me because my husband John is a Vietnam veteran, and at reunions of the men with whom he served and their families, we “wives” would often discuss the difficulties that come with PTSD. At the time, Susan was also seeing many system problems—young people either couldn’t get into the labor force or they had trouble staying there. She realized there was a huge need to offer community services to these individuals.
To understand both service delivery and systems, Susan obtained master’s degrees in both social work and social planning—at the same time. She was the first to do this, but as a systems thinker it didn’t make sense to her to get into social work and social planning without understanding the structure of casework.
To show how well this combination has served her, I want to list key aspects of her career to date:
- First executive director of a community planning and allocations council that determined how to allocate United Way money across a wide spectrum in New Hampshire in Vermont. She made this new council do its job, together with the community board.
- Executive director of the New Hampshire Developmental Disabilities Council, focusing on designing and building a community care system for people with developmental disabilities. She r e-built this Council and located it close to the Governor’s Office.
- Cabinet-level position with Maine’s Governor McKernan as the Commissioner of that state’s Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, with a charge to decrease the use of hospital facilities and establish the groundwork for community care systems.
- Appointed by then-president George H. W. Bush as the associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration’s Disability Insurance program (where she noted the disturbing trend that people were no longer going on disability mostly for back issues, but for mental health issues, because systems were not established to support them in the workplace).
- Secretary general of the world’s largest and oldest non-governmental organization in rehab, Rehabilitation International
- Recruited by the International Labor Office (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland. to build a policy called The Code of Practice of Disability in the Workplace. ILO had a consultative model to permit the bringing in of expertise from NGOs, such as with occupational therapy, which Parker notes is well known to larger employers, because they help with the essential issue of employee retention.
- Senior executive with the Department of Labor, building a new agency that develops employment policy able to increase the recruiting, hiring, and retention of job seekers with disabilities: The Office of Disability and Employment Policy.
Susan believes work is the great equalizer, which is another reason for her career-long support of occupational therapy. She believes so many people should be able to return to work, but they and their employers don’t know how to keep them there. She currently works on labor issues covering both mental health and veterans, focusing on entering and re-entering the workforce. She points out that employment is a real issue among people in mental health recovery, and she is working on creating new policies to assist them. Even among members of the work force who are on extended sick leave, their most frequent complaint is mental health related, such as anxiety and stress. A lot of people need help in this area, and occupational therapy practitioners can provide that help.
I am so thrilled that Dr. Bose and Susan Parker are helping put occupational therapy in high definition. Be sure to stop by the Member Resource Center after the Opening Ceremony for Conference on Thursday, April 14, to meet members of your AOTA Board of Directors!