Steve Wilkinson Receives Stanford Award

Although he left our department at the end of fall semester, we can't help but brag on former faculty member Steve Wilkinson who, with two co-authors, received the Stanford Award at the business meeting of the Education Section at the APTA Combined Sections Meeting on Friday, February 11, 2011.

The Stanford Award is given annually by the Education Section of APTA to recognize the author(s) of a paper "containing the most influential educational ideas". The Stanford Award was initiated by Dr. Kay Shepard in 2000 through an endowment to the Section for Education. Kay’s editorial about the award can be found in JPTE Volume 15, No. 1, Spring 2001.

As anyone who knows Steve is already aware, he is a great forward thinker when it comes to the use of technology and the importance of medical informatics in physical therapy education and practice. Before he left our department, he published an article titled, "Establishing the Centrality of Health Informatics in Physical Therapist Education: If Not Now, When?" along with co-authors Julia Chevan and Daniel Vreeman. The article appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Physical Therapy Education (Vol 24, No 3, pp. 10-15).

The article presents, "specific recommendations to help strengthen the centrality of informatics within physical therapist education, such as including health informatics as a foundational domain and fully developing the set of core informatics competencies for physical therapy." Further, the authors, "encourage the academic

community to engage in activities and dialog that clarify the role of informatics in physical therapist education."

Our department is very actively working on ways to meet the authors' challenge. Stay tuned for cool things. :-)

Jim Dronberger Named to PT Advisory Commission

In early March of this year, a Missouri senate review panel approved Governor Nixon’s appointment of Jim Dronberger (PT, DPT, OCS, MBA)  to the Advisory Commission for Physical Therapists in the state of Missiouri. Jim has been a member of the PT faculty at Rockhurst since 1991.

Jim will serve a four year term and will work with the four other members of the commission to advise the Missouri Board of Healing Arts on licensure and regulation issues as they pertain to the profession of physical therapy.

Congratulations and thanks to Jim for stepping up to help and support our profession with his service.

Where Have We Been?

Although today's snow is a temporary setback, spring is steadily creeping closer...

It's hard to believe that it's been almost two months since we posted any news and information about PT Education at Rockhurst! It's not because there hasn't been anything going on. Quite the opposite, we've been very engaged in quite a few interesting projects and activities over the last two months. We're going to start posting updates on a very frequent basis over the next couple of weeks to get everyone caught up on all the cool stuff. Stay tuned.

If you have news that you'd like to share with the Rockhurst PT community, just send an email to Brian McKiernan (brian.mckiernan@rockhurst.edu). Thanks!