As s
ome of you have already heard, my longtime colleague Gerry Balasta, fellow NYC Occupational Therapist died of COVID 19 on April 18th 2020. I had known and worked with Gerry for over 20 years; he was just embarking on his latest entrepreneurial venture, Wonderful Beginnings, an EI and early childhood center that he was opening with Lea, his beloved wife, a physician.  I can think of no better way to honor him than with this scholarship.
Gerry loved life, his Queens community, his chosen field of Occupational Therapy and was proud of his Filipino roots. He had many stories to tell about people and used his OT background, and innate people skills in film making. After taking courses in film production at NYU, he went on to create, direct and produce his first film in 2010,THE MOUNTAIN THIEF which told the story of the people of Patayas, one of the Philippines’ largest dumpsite towns. Gerry masterfully told the story of the people of the town who  live off the mountains of trash in dumpsite towns but manage to retain their dignity and thankfulness for life,. The film had a hugely successful film festival run,won the Special Jury Prize at the  San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, The Prix Du Public (Audience Award) at CCIFF, France and the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award in Washington DC. In 2012, he founded The Mount Hope Project Inc., a charitable organization with the mission of using films and the arts to make a direct impact on lives. He also founded The Mount Hope Initiative in the Philippines where the children and the actors of his workshop in the dump site town had medical care and are now going to school, to give them options outside of scavenging for trash.  He recently sold a pediatric entity in NY to his partners, so that he could embark on another clinic.
The American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) is a 501(c)(3) charitable, scientific and educational organization founded in 1965. It serves the public interest by supporting occupational therapy research and increasing public understanding of the important relationship between everyday activities (occupations) and health.  It accomplishes its aims primarily through grants and scholarships, through programs, and through publications.  The money raised for the Gerry Balasta Scholarship Fund will be used exclusively for prospective Occupational Therapy Students applying to any of the  accredited Occupational Therapy programs In NYS in 2021.
I know that these are trying times financially for many practice owners and their families, and any donation,no matter the amount will help to honor the legacy of this great therapist. Thank you in advance, and please feel free to email me directly if you have any questions. All donations are tax deductible.
To DONATE

Posted on: November 21, 2011

Reprinted from the NYTimes  April 2018 By Kerry Hannon
Two years ago I hosted a webinar for therapists over 50. Since that time I have been looking for different ways to support my over 50 colleagues ( myself included). One  easy way is to share information, and here for starters is a great article.

For Susan Golden, now 64, flinging on a backpack filled with books and rambling around the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif., for a year in 2016 was “like drinking from a fire hose,” she said. “There was so much to learn, so many classes and lectures I could attend.”

She graduated that year from the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, operated in partnership with the Stanford Center on Longevity. Each academic year 25 fellows, who have had two or three decades of a successful career, are selected to attend the program and to enroll in classes across the university.
Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, a yearlong program for corporate executives and professionals interested in applying their skills to social problems, operates with a similar concept. The program’s fellows (for 2018, 48 were selected from more than 550 applicants) get to audit courses at the university and its graduate schools and develop independent projects with professors and fellow students.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor who is director of the leadership initiative, said the program was started “to deploy a new leadership force of people transitioning from their main career to their next years of service.”

Todd Fisher, 52, a fellow in Harvard’s program, was ready for a new challenge. He was a global chief administrative officer and partner of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company and, he said, “I wanted to fundamentally shift my career.”

When Mr. Fisher turned 50, he heard about the program and started to make his plan. “I was nervous about finding my new career,” he said. “I’m the type of guy who wants to go get things done. I felt it would be valuable for me to be in a stimulating environment, where I had to develop different routines and to detox, or reprogram.”

This semester, Mr. Fisher is enrolled in a course on community colleges and another on leaders and leadership in history at the Harvard Kennedy School. His aim is to figure out his “next direction, to have a little bit of fun, make some new friends and to broaden my perspective and life,” he said. “I did not retire in the classic sense of the word. I do want to throw myself into something else: a true second career.”

In addition to the Stanford and Harvard programs, there are a handful of other educational programs for Gen Xers and baby boomers eyeing a second act.

Later this year, for example, the University of Notre Dame will start the Inspired Leadership Initiative, a one-year program for “accomplished leaders at the end of their careers.”

The University of Texas at Austin will also welcome later this year its first cadre for its nine-month Tower Fellows Program for those who “have built a career of major accomplishments (20 to 30 years) and who now seek to deepen their knowledge and/or embrace new fields.”

Reprinted from the NYTimes  – September 2018  N. Bakalar

More than 230,000 children younger than 15 months were treated in emergency rooms for injuries incurred while using infant walkers from 1990 to 2014.

An analysis published in Pediatrics has found that 6,539 of them had skull fractures, 91 percent of them from falling down stairs. The devices are banned in Canada, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that they be banned in the United States as well.

The number of injuries went down in 1994 with the introduction of stationary activity centers — devices similar to walkers, but without wheels. Injuries declined again in the four years following the adoption of federal mandatory safety standards in 2010. Other factors may have been involved in the decrease as well, including declining infant walker sales, the number of them still in use, and product recalls.

“There are no advantages to using walkers,” said the senior author, Dr. Gary A. Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “They continue to have the potential for serious injury. Parents should be told not to use them.”

Reprinted from the NYTimes – 4.12.2016 Written by on a Friday night. Dhruv Khullar, M.D., M.P.P. is a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Too good and spot on not to share – this gentle and beautifully written reminder for everyone in the healthcare field!

Friday night in the emergency department is about what you’d think. It starts off slow: a middle-aged man with a middling pneumonia; an older nursing home resident with a urinary tract infection that is making her delirious. Then come two heart attacks at the same time, followed by a drunken driver with a head bleed and half his rib cage fractured. At midnight, in roll the inebriated members of a bachelorette party that has not gone, one assumes, according to plan.

Amid the chaos, I break off to greet a thin, older man, quietly bundled up on a hallway stretcher. I look over his chart and prior scans. His prostate cancer has grown through several chemotherapy regimens. His spine is full of tumor and he’s been vomiting everything he eats or drinks for weeks. He can’t move the left side of his body after a recent stroke.

He smiles a charming, crooked smile. “It hasn’t been the best month of my life.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

I ask him about his symptoms, when they started, how bad they’ve gotten. He asks me where I went to medical school and if I have a girlfriend. I ask him if he’s dizzy and whether there’s blood in his stool. He tells me he emigrated from Greece 50 years ago, almost to the day. He won a scholarship to M.I.T. and studied electrical engineering. There he met his wife — “a fantastic cook” — and started his first company.

Now, decades later, he’s alone — in a crowded emergency room, on a Friday night, his wife dead, his two sons overseas, a nurse visiting him once a week at home to help him with some medicines and make sure the various tubes coming out of his body aren’t infected.

I ask him when he last moved his bowels. “Son, I’m dying. I’m alone. One day you’ll learn there’s more to a good death than how often I move my bowels.” I pause.

I am better at many things than I was when I started my journey to become a physician more than a decade ago. But I am not sure that understanding patients as people — and placing them in the context of their long, messy, beautiful lives — is one of them.

Doctors are trained first to diagnose, treat and fix — and second, to comfort, palliate and soothe. The result is a slow loss of vision, an inability to see who and what people are outside the patient we see in the hospital.

As we acquire new and more technical skills, we begin to devalue what we had before we started: understanding, empathy, imagination. We see patients dressed in hospital gowns and non-skid socks — not jeans and baseball caps — and train our eyes to see asymmetries, rashes and blood vessels, while un-training them to see insecurities, joys and frustrations. As big data, consensus statements and treatment algorithms pervade medicine, small gestures of kindness and spontaneity — the caregiving equivalents of holding open doors and pulling out chairs — fall by the wayside.

But all care is ultimately delivered at the level of an individual. And while we might learn more about a particular patient’s preferences or tolerance for risk while explaining the pros and cons of a specific procedure or test, a more robust, more holistic understanding requires a deeper appreciation of “Who is this person I’m speaking with?”

In Britain, a small but growing body of research has found that allowing patients to tell their life stories has benefits for both patients and caregivers. Research — focused mostly on older patients and other residents of long-term care facilities — suggests that providing a biographical account of one’s past can help patients gain insight into their current needs and priorities, and allow doctors to develop closer relationships with patients by more clearly seeing “the person behind the patient.”

In the United States, Medicare recently began paying doctors to talk with their patients about end-of-life planning. These conversations allow patients to discuss and explore their preferences about a slew of complex medical interventions, including clinical trials, transfers to the intensive care unit, use of mechanical ventilation or feeding tubes, and the desire to die at home or in the hospital. These discussions, too, may benefit from a biographical approach, in which patients are able to elaborate on what is and has been most important in their lives. To better serve patients, we need to see not only who they are, but also who they were, and ultimately, who they hope to become even at the end of life.

How much more effective would we be as diagnosticians, prognosticators and healers if we had a more longitudinal understanding of the patient in front of us? If we saw not just the shrunken, elderly Greek man on the emergency room stretcher in front of us, but also the proud teenager flying across the Atlantic to start a new life half a century ago?

The emergency room is, by its nature, an arena designed for quick thinking and swift action. There are certainly other places, times and circumstances more conducive to probing goals-of-care discussions and lengthy forays into the internal lives of patients.

Still, there is always some moment of grace and meaning we can help patients find in the time they have left, a moment that recalls a time when they felt most alive — even if it’s just a fleeting conversation about gyros and electrical circuits in a busy emergency room, late on a Friday night.

“When I got married at the age of 52 my private practice flourished, because we built a separate building that housed my then-husband’s practice of psychotherapy on one side and my OT practice on the other. In 1984 we moved from New Jersey to Vermont and I was a consultant for the school system there.I tried to retire five times – as an OT, as a private practitioner, as an author – but it never works. I went back to school to become an artist in 1997 and that has been helpful in drawing my inventions.

In 2013, I saw David Kelley – the founder of the design firm IDEO – on the TV programme 60 minutes. When I realised he accepted, and really respected, people from a varied background, I thought, “I have a unique kind of life experience and designing skills – I could be of value to their firm.” I was 89.I typed a letter, which might have caught their attention because they don’t get many communications by “snail mail”- I have macular degeneration so my eyesight prevents me from using computers.”

Read more at:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33626980