August 31, 2011
Gersh Presents Poster at World Congress
PTWA Eastern Washington At-Large Director Meryl Gersh, PT, PhD, presented her special-interest poster, “Patient Empowerment Through Collaborative Education: Implementing Public Education Programs Concurrently with Professional Conferences,” at the World Confederation of Physical Therapy’s annual congress, World Physical Therapy 2011, in June in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The poster described the origination, organization and implementation of the consumer education programs offered by PTWA at spring conferences and last year by APTA at its national conference. The research topic came out of Gersh’s doctoral work and dissertation, the topic of which was professionalism in physical therapy from the patients’ perspective.
At the congress, Gersh was involved in a new poster discussion format. This format brought together six speakers and a panel leader. Each speaker briefly presented the highlights of their poster. Participants were given time to visit each of the speakers at their posters, then reconvene as a group to ask questions of the panelists.
Following the poster-discussion session a member of the WCPT executive board told Gersh that she liked the concept of consumer education concurrent with a professional meeting and that she planned to bring the idea forward to the conference committee planning WCPT 2015 inSingapore. “If they adopt it, I hope to assist with the organization of such an activity at the next WCPT meeting,” Gersh said. In an email, Gersh added, “It’s going viral!”
