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News Releases
Honored Researcher Heads up MARRTC Project
Columbia, Mo. (May 1999) - Tireless service is rewarded.
Marilyn K. Sanford, Ph.D., received the Outstanding Service to the Profession Award from the American Physical Therapy Association's Missouri Chapter this spring.
A physical therapist, Sanford also is a co-investigator and principal investigator for the Missouri Arthritis Rehabilitation Research and Training Center. Sanford received the honor at the organization's spring conference at the Lake of the Ozarks in April 1999. The Missouri Chapter has about 900 members including physical therapists and physical therapist assistants. The honor highlights her contributions to patient care, research and education.
Sanford's service includes the chapter's presidency for three years, chief delegate for the Missouri Chapter for five years, treasurer for the Central District, serving on the fiscal oversight committee plus other positions.
As chapter president, Sanford's duties included traveling to the state legislature to testify about physical therapy, patient care, health-care reform. Her duties also included lobbying members of Congress in Washington, D.C.
However, Sanford does not see her services to the Missouri Chapter as extraordinary. "The position overlaps with being a faculty member," Sanford said. As a faculty member, she explained, she must discuss policy issues regarding health care with students on a daily basis.
Sanford is an clinical associate professor and chair of the University of Missouri-Columbia's Department of Physical Therapy within the School of Health Related Professions (SHRP).
She notes the same faculty-professional overlap motivates her to join MARRTC's research efforts. The goals of physical therapists, Sanford said, are to improve the health care patients receive, their quality of life and access to appropriate health care.
Helping People Get Back to Work
At MARRTC, Sanford is a co-investigator on the "Vocational Enablement Program for Persons with Arthritis and Related Musculoskeletal Diseases."
This project is designed to help adults with arthritis return to the workforce.
The project helps adults assess what kind of work is appropriate despite disabilities they may have from arthritis or other musculoskeletal diseases.
Improving Health Care
Sanford is the principal investigator on another MARRTC project entitled, "Rehabilitation Sciences and Engineering: A Model Curriculum for Arthritis Health Professionals."
The project's goal is to administer seminars to help health-care providers stay on the cutting edge of research and learn more about other disciplines so they can better counsel patients.
The seminars are needed because as medical care shifts to out-patient care from in-patient care, the lines of communication among the various health-care providers have diminished.
"People are working fast and hard but they may not be not talking to anyone else," Sanford said. Multidisciplinary knowledge and a willingness to refer patients are especially crucial for patients with rheumatoid arthritis, Sanford said.
"Rheumatoid arthritis and other forms of arthritis cause a variety of problems such as pain and decreased function," she said. The problems can then lead to psychological and social troubles at work, within the family, in school and other spheres of a patient's life, she explained. As a result, providers should understand that an arthritis patient may need to see an occupational therapist or similar professional as well as a medical specialist, Sanford noted.
The curriculum also will help health-care professionals learn new approaches and techniques. For example, Sanford said, in the April 14, 1999 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) an article reported rheumatoid arthritis patients' conditions improved after writing about past traumatic events in their lives during three 20-minute sessions.
But given the hectic schedule of most health-care providers, Sanford said she doubts many have heard about the findings reported in JAMA.
"There needs to be a forum to share those kinds of ideas," Sanford said.
The more a health-care provider knows and shares with a patient, the more likely the patient will become an active participant in their own health care, she said. "The goal is to teach people with arthritis to manage themselves," Sanford said.
The curriculum will be piloted at the Harry S. Truman Veterans Administration Hospital in Columbia, Mo., with a tentative start date of January 2000.
Along with using a variety of resources, including VA personnel, the curriculum will include use of the Internet to bring in speakers from outside the region. At this stage, plans call for weekly meetings at the VA Hospital, which may or may not include attending rounds.
Currently, Sanford said recruiting efforts are under way. The proposed weekly one-hour sessions will be open to all health-care professionals including medical residents and fellows, physical therapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists, speech pathologists, primary care physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and others.
Continuing Education Units may be offered for hospital employees and Sanford hopes to be able to offer course credit, too.
Once the curriculum is launched at the VA Hospital, a manual and set of video tapes will be developed so it can be shared with other health-care professionals.
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