The School of Rehabilitation Therapy is looking forward to welcoming alumni to campus during Queen’s Homecoming, October 13-15th, 2017. A highlight of the weekend will be the School’s Annual Homecoming Brunch hosted at the Donald Gordon Centre on Saturday, October 14th. The Brunch includes the presentation of the Distinguished Alumni Awards.

As a Gold Sponsor of the School of Rehabilitation Therapy’s 50th Anniversary, the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (CAOT) was invited to write a feature piece for the School’s News Blog. We warmly thank CAOT for the contribution of this article, and for their generous support of the School in its 50th year. 

This article was contributed by Surajo Sulaiman, a doctoral student in the Rehabilitation Science program. Surajo is a physiotherapist by training and throughout his career has worked as a clinician, primarily with persons with physical disabilities in Nigeria. Through his research, Surajo hopes to improve the quality of life of polio-survivors and other persons with disabilities in Nigeria.

Over this past weekend, family, friends and colleagues gathered at the Queen’s University Club to celebrate the life of Dr. Malcolm Peat, the former Director of the Queen’s University School of Rehabilitation Therapy and founder of the International Centre for the Advancement of Community Based Rehabilitation (ICACBR).  Malcolm died suddenly on January 17th while on vacation in Italy.  He would have thoroughly enjoyed the event on Saturday as it brought together people from many dimensions of his life.

One of the strategic priorities of the School of Rehabilitation Therapy is to make meaningful contributions to the work of our collaborators locally, nationally and internationally.  Today we are very pleased to announce that we have made a major step towards meeting this goal through a 10 year, USD$24.2 million partnership with Ethiopia’s University of Gondar and The MasterCard Foundation’s Scholars Program.

Happy New Year!  As we embark on 2017, one of my new year’s resolutions is to be courageous in setting bold goals for the progress of the School of Rehabilitation Therapy in collaboration with faculty, staff, students and other stakeholders.  This work must build on our previous successes and address key areas that will support people and programs to move forward.  An important first step is to acknowledge what we accomplished in 2016 so that our goals go beyond what we have already achieved.  For this first blog of 2017, I wanted to highlight just a few of the School’s successes from 2016.