This weekend I taught a continuing education course with three other therapists. It took well over a year for us to organize the content, create the handouts and visual displays and market the course to get as many participants as possible. It was a fun process to figure out the best way to engage the participants and relay the most important ...

Anyone who reads my blog with regularity knows the last year has been a struggle for me. I lost my beloved job. I was fired for being ethical. I encountered more than my share of unethical and self-serving people. During all of that, I hung on and kept going to work. Every so often I made a difference to someone, which kept me going. For the ...

Now that I'm home from CSM, I've had an opportunity to process all of the information. Most of the presentations were excellent. Those that weren't purely theoretical had a common theme. We have to maximize what we do because we're spending less and less time with patients. We have less time to spend because there isn't money to pay for our ...

The following post was written by ADVANCE guest blogger Brian Knutsen, OTR/L, CHT, president of Buzzards Bay Hand Therapy LLC, located in Marion and Lexington, MA. SAN DIEGO -- In the CSM session, ''Emerging Technologies for Enhancing Post-Stroke Arm Rehabilitation,'' speakers Mindy Levin, PT, PhD, and Michelle Harris-Love PT, PhD, discussed two ...

The following post was written by ADVANCE guest blogger Brian Knutsen, OTR/L, CHT, president of Buzzards Bay Hand Therapy LLC, located in Marion and Lexington, MA. SAN DIEGO -- In the ''Assessment of Upper Extremity Impairment, Function, and Activity Following Stroke'' session at CSM, Catherine E. Lang, PT, PhD, shared the foundations for ...

SAN DIEGO -- Just like my fellow ADVANCE blogger Lauren, I'll be attending the APTA Combined Sections Meeting in San Diego. CSM happens this week so I'm already in my hotel. I've registered and picked up my materials. I attended my pre-conference workshop on item writing. I'm ready for things to begin. Unlike most of my fellow therapists, the ...

As a member of the neurological section, I receive a monthly electronic newsletter. A few months ago, it included a request for volunteers to work on developing an acute stroke care course. Obviously that caught my attention. I completed the application and included a cover letter explaining the holes in the application and expanding on my ...

The Physiotherapy UK 2012 conference was in Liverpool this weekend. As I'm now in New York, I couldn't make it to defend the poster of my research, but I left that task in the capable hands of my second author. Unfortunately, she had some serious family issues arise that demanded her attention back in Leeds. The third author was already home with ...

Last week, I wrote about my experiences teaching my first CEU course. I mentioned how much work it was but didn't go into details. It took me nearly four months to finish, including two months of working at least an hour or two every night. Now I'm going back and revising the content. I'm beginning to think that is an ongoing process. In the ...

For the past three years, I've had the wonderful experience of working and living in a world previously unknown to me. I arrived with lots of clinical experience and ideas from home to a place at once familiar and foreign. The language was both comfortable and disconcerting, with a combination of accents: Geordie, Mackem, Australian and Scottish. ...