Fall Commencement, Week of October 18th

Students, Faculty, Residents, Staff, Alumni, Board Members and Friends,

This morning I’m sending this update out from sunny and cool Charleston, South Carolina where I had the opportunity to meet up with Dr. Eckert who is attending the annual conference of the Association of Schools Advancing Health Profession’s annual conference and board meeting.  Our own Dr. Mitch Scheiman will be presenting to the group and Dr. Eckert sits on their board.  I am “double dipping” on this trip as I am also in town to speak at a retirement ceremony for one of my Navy colleagues who will be transitioning after 30 years of service to our great navy and country.  I love it when a plan comes together!

I’d like to give a “shout out” to Dr. Jim Caldwell and Ms. Shannon Boss and their staffs for all the work they did to ensure that Monday’s graduation lunch and long white coat ceremony and Tuesday’s commencement ceremony at the Kimmel Center all went off without a hitch!  Thank you for all the work you do to make it all look easy (and we all know it’s not!).

Closer to home, I'm excited to announce that a Blindness and Low Vision Studies (BLVS) grant proposal has been selected for funding by the Department of Education's Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA). The $750,000 grant will support Project MORE: Mentorships for Outcomes Related to Employment, a project designed to alleviate the nationwide shortage of qualified low vision rehabilitation (LVR) and vision rehabilitation therapy (VRT) personnel and address documented employment challenges experienced by individuals with visual impairments. Kerry Lueders, MS, COMS, TVI, CLVT, assistant professor for BLVS will be the Project Director. Congratulations to the whole BLVS team for making this happen! 

During the last week of August, twelve Physician Assistant (PA) students, along with PA faculty members, returned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a one-time workshop with Museum educators as a part of a series of workshops called “The Art of Observation.”   NBC10 was there to feature the educational workshop on a segment called “Growing Greater Philadelphia” which aired Tuesday night. You can watch it online here. I encourage you to watch the entire segment as it features local business leaders and entrepreneurs from our region. Our segment starts roughly at 16:30. Thank you to everyone who made this happen!  

Last weekend, Anna Grasso, MS, OTR/L, CAPS, assistant professor of our Occupational Therapy (OT) program, along with two OT students from the Phi Theta Epsilon OT Honor Society volunteered with the Rebuilding Together Philadelphia (RTP) Block Build event in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. During these events, Ms. Grasso and the students were able to provide adaptive equipment and home safety recommendations for homeowners and their families to improve health and safety. Read more about their partnership with RTP at salus.edu/RTP-OT.

This Saturday, the Pennsylvania Ear Institute (PEI) will be hosting its annual Fall Open House from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Audiology students and PEI clinical staff will be hosting tours of PEI, providing hearing screenings, demos of hearing aids and other technology, “meet the experts” talks, and more. If you know anyone who would be interested in stopping by, send them this link to register! 

Also this weekend, students from our Student Academy of Audiology (SAA) will be attending the Pennsylvania Walk4Hearing event at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. Our students and audiology faculty members will also be providing hearing screenings for this years attendees. For more information visit http://hlaa.convio.net/site/TR?fr_id=2566&pg=entry.

With some of you now finished with mid-terms and others still looking forward to them, I encourage you all to take a “brain-break” and get out to enjoy the pretty fall colors and nice weather.  Have a great weekend – Many of us will be gone next week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Optometry.  For those of you who will be there, please join us for our Alumni and Friends reception on Friday evening in the Orchid Room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel at 7:30PM.

Mike

Students, Faculty, Residents, Staff, Alumni, Board of Trustee members and Friends,

It’s been a really hot and steamy week in Philadelphia and all up and down the East Coast. It’s also been a week to welcome back all those returning students from rotations or summer breaks. It’s really fun to walk around campus and feel the energy everyone brings to campus this time of the year! Our goal is to keep that energy level going throughout the year!!!

I’d like for all of our students, but especially our new ones, to take full advantage of the healthcare services we provide at Salus. To that end, I’d like each new student to make appointments at The Eye Institute, Pennsylvania Ear Institute and Speech-Language Institute.  For those returning students, if you haven’t already done this, please make the time to get it done. Even if you don’t feel like you need to have your eyes and ears checked or you don’t have any speech, swallowing or associated problems, it’s a great idea to learn a little about what your colleagues at Salus are doing. While you may not be able to get a same day appointment, please be patient and schedule something soon. It doesn’t cost you anything but time unless you need glasses, contacts or some other device - and those are provided close to “cost."  Your visit will allow your colleagues to experience patient contacts while you learn about their professions. 

While November doesn’t seem all that close right now, it will be here right before we know it. To that end, I’d like to remind everyone that the twelfth annual "Looking Out For Kids" Charity Fundraiser will be held at the Philadelphia Hilton, City Line Avenue on November 3^rd. Building on last year’s successful event this year’s will be even bigger and better!  We will be honoring Donna Frisby-Greenwood with our third annual Lighthouse Award. Ms. Frisby-Greenwood is the first president and CEO of the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia. Her work with the children of Philadelphia over the years has made a significant impact in their lives.  

This week students in our Physician Assistant (PA) program began the first in a series of three “The Art of Observation” workshops at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of their Physical Diagnosis 1 course. Half of the Class of 2020 and several faculty attended the gallery sessions yesterday and the other half is scheduled for later in September. Two museum educators are conducting the sessions, which are highly interactive, and involve individual and group exercises. PA faculty are also involved in the sessions in order to bring a clinical/medical perspective to the workshops. The curriculum in the first in the series covers Observing & Describing; the second session in the Spring will cover Interpreting, and the last session in the Summer will cover Empathy, Perspective Taking and Recognizing Bias. The art museum program was originally developed for Penn medical students, and is based on a Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero.  It’s great to see this innovative education model being leveraged for our students!

The Salus Scoop will be held from 12:30 – 2:30 P.M. later today in the Hafter Center gymnasium. It will be a great way for students (especially new students) to get to know clubs and organizations on campus. There will be FREE FOOD, including some pretty awesome food trucks, lots of games and prizes.  

Also, today, Dr. Eric Branda, the Director of Product Management for Sivantos, Inc. who has provided audiological, technical and product training support in the area of audiology for over 20 years will be defending his PhD dissertation in W400 at 1:00 PM.  Dr. Branda earned his audiology degree from the Arizona School of Health Sciences and has been working on his PhD at Salus for the past few years.His dissertation is titled,  “Effects of Working Memory on the Degree of Benefit for Speech Understanding in Noise with Binaural Wireless Beamforming”.  Even if you’re just curious as to what the name of his dissertation actually means, I encourage you to attend!

Did anyone see a camera crew on campus the last few days?  We're working on a virtual tour of campus, and can't wait to share it with you when its complete!  So if you see a camera crew, smile!

For all of our Jewish friends, I’d like to wish you all a very Happy and Healthy New Year or the traditional “Shanah Tovah” as you prepare to celebrate Rosh Hashanah Sunday evening.  May this year bring good health, happiness, prosperity and for our students, good grades!  

Have a great weekend. It it looks like it will certainly be much cooler than the rest of the week. Please get outside, exercise, relax (I purposefully used those words in the same sentence) and have fun. Looking forward to seeing you back on campus ready to learn on Monday!

Mike