Achieving Excellence Through Competition
AOTA President Florence Clark started her Presidential Address with a series of photos and movie clips demonstrating her early years growing up in New York City and Long Island, NY. Like others with an older sibling, Clark spent much of her childhood doing whatever her brother was doing. In the process she developed a competitive spirit.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Clark emphasized that it is a credit to our profession that practitioners are compassionate, kind, and honest. But these values do not preclude competition. “Competition is not mean,” she emphasized. But we can’t continue to let others define occupational therapy. That’s not playing nice—it’s playing dead.”
Clark offered that we are sleeping giants who must stop letting others muscle in. We need to be worthy collaborators rather than support personnel. As she noted, “victories are sometimes won through teamwork but always through competition.”
And we can still be nice.
Clark emphasized that in its best form, we compete with, not against others. And when all occupational therapy team members are strong, we will have better outcomes and the consumer will win.
Clark also pointed out that just like HDTV, HDOT requires power. No single pixel can stand alone, but neither can there be a brilliant picture with missing pixels. Power in numbers influences policy, and allows us to show the public that rehab is about not just getting back to life, but Living Life To Its Fullest.
Clark shared her confidence that this is OT’s time, based on the rising incidence of polytrauma and TBI, much as PT gained momentum during the polio epidemic. She suggested emphasizing those areas in which OT is already well recognized, including hand therapy, autism, and wounded warriors. She also suggested a playbook to give us a competitive edge, suggesting practitioners share published studies emphasizing OT’s effectiveness, increase grant proposals to NIH, using our experience in home health for falls prevention, “owning” the appropriate words in documentation to reflect OT intervention, being sure reimbursers provide sufficient coverage for our services, promoting telemedicine, entering power circles to know what kind of evidence counts, and partnering with consumers who have benefitted from OT.
Just as Rocky Balboa mastered the steps to “Flying High Now,” Clark proposed that the profession began to fly with the 2003 creation of the Centennial Vision. She encouraged attendees to support the tenets of the Vision, and introduced Laura Gitlin as an “OT Olympian” for her research on dementia care and caregiver support. Clark closed to the “Rocky” theme, urging attendees to “get fired up” and assuring them “our time is now!”
