Venturing Out and Attending the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine Annual Conference
I am in the habit of attending primarily occupational therapy conferences, so when I recently was a participant at the annual meeting of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM), it seemed out of the ordinary at first—no big opening ceremony, no dancing in the aisles, far fewer participants in the plenary session than at AOTA (600 versus 6,000), and a mix of rehabilitation professionals from diverse professions.
To be honest, I was surprised and pleased to see that so many of my occupational therapy colleagues were among the mix. In fact, at a luncheon I attended comprised of a stroke networking group, not only was occupational therapist Dr. Beth Skidmore in the leadership, but I would estimate that 30% of the 100 participants were occupational therapists. We definitely were an important constituency at this meeting. Some of my takeaways included a comprehensive notebook of quality measures for rehabilitation that provide policy, provider, and patient perspectives; familiarity with National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research (NCMRR) funded infrastructures to which all of us have access that can assist in locating appropriate measures or databases for our studies, and the knowledge that large scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to date indicate that, while manualized interventions in general have been shown to be beneficial compared to usual care for stroke patients, the various manualized approaches are all comparable in their effectiveness. All in all, I found the content of presentations to be outstanding. I really want to urge all of you to venture out—being in an interdisciplinary world for several days is both eye-opening and wonderfully satisfying.