OT Department Announces Transportation Fundraising Initiative to Make the Kean Community Cares Clinic More Accessible to Residents throughout the Region
UNION - Kean University recently held the grand opening for its new Kean Community Cares Clinic, one of the few free standing occupational therapy (OT) clinics that serves clients of all ages from infants to older adults. The new facility also enables students in the highly competitive M.S. in Occupational Therapy to receive training in New Jersey's only university-based OT clinic - one of only 17 nationally.
"We have been dreaming forever about the day we would have a clinic," said Kean OT Chair Dr. Laurie Knis-Matthews. "The benefit to the community residents who use our services is that we can provide them with the care that they need at an affordable cost. We have individualized evaluation and treatment sessions as well as therapeutic groups for clients who have common goals. Many of these successful programs are on display here tonight."
Alumni, students, faculty, donors and leadership from Kean and its Nathan Weiss Graduate College celebrated the official opening of the clinic during a ribbon cutting ceremony. The facility's new client treatment areas, a clinic-based teaching area and three classrooms were created through a 9,100-square-foot renovation to the graduate building on the university's East Campus in Hillside, supported in part by New Jersey's Building Our Future Bond Act.
"The benefit for our students is that they can now have their clinical skills training in a real clinic setting right here on campus," said Kean Community Cares Clinic Director Geraldine Pagaoa-Cruz. "The students are in the clinic for lab work within their first year and this continues into their second year in their seminar courses where they are learning more advanced clinical skills and taking that knowledge with them each week to their level I fieldwork internship sites. We also now have the opportunity to provide level I and II fieldwork internships through the clinic so that our students can get the hands-on training they need to be entry level practitioners right here at Kean."
With a 100 percent student pass rate on the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy, the Kean OT program has long been one of the most competitive nationally, drawing well over 300 applications annually for 35 student slots. Not a department to rest on its laurels, the Kean OT program is ready to take on its next challenge.
"We now need a school bus and the budget to support a driver and operational expenses," said Kean Assistant OT Professor Dr. Jennifer Gardner, estimating the cost of the bus alone at $100,000. "The mission of the clinic is to serve the local community and one of the largest obstacles to getting these services to residents is the lack of safe transportation. If we had a bus, the number of people who access our services would increase significantly to say the least."
The Kean staff appealed to donors in attendance to support several available fundraising opportunities to support the initiative, as did Donald Brady, a long time donor and Kean Foundation Board Member. For information on the fundraising effort please contact the Kean Office of Institutional Advancement at tonhall@kean.edu or (908) 737-3469.
"The OT program at Kean is world class and the people in this group are very special," said Brady, whose late wife Kathy was an OT faculty member. "They will stop at nothing to help change peoples lives and we need to help them do just that."
The clinic is a state-of-the-art facility that serves all ages, providing occupational therapy services for children, adolescents and adults, focused on rehabilitation and maximizing independence, mental health, productive aging, and health and wellness.
The Kean M.S. in Occupational Therapy, has ranked in U.S. News and World Report'sTop 100 of Best Graduate Occupational Therapy Programs and was just recently re-accredited for 10 years by the Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education (ACOTE) of the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA). For more information, please visit grad.kean.edu/ot. For more information on the clinic, please call (908) 737-5940 or email at OTClinic@kean.edu.