Brooks adaptive sports recreation program

Whether you are interested in meeting new friends, learning a new skill, getting in shape or training for the Paralympics, we are here for you! Medical Reviewer: Alice Krauss, M. Last Updated: September 15, Medical Reviewer. Alice Krauss, M. She has worked with Brooks Rehabilitation as an occupational therapist for the past 38 years, working as a clinician for fourteen years, manager of the Occupational Therapy Department for the next 10 years before the launch of the community based Adaptive Sports and Recreation program in Alice is a passionate occupational therapist who believes in the transformative power of participation in personally meaningful daily activities to enhance health, well-being and quality of life.

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Brooks Adaptive Sports and Recreation Blog. A place for Fun, Fitness and Friendship! Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Loading Comments But what is it about that that you liked?

Well, I like to do outdoors photography. Okay, so you like outdoor, you like to be outdoors. You like to be creative, you like art. What do you like about that? And now we talked to Jody on the last episode about the Aphasia Center and Crowdsourcing , but this Adaptive Sports came before Crowdsourcing.

So tell us about that process of where you, obviously you were being an OT before, you had this idea, how to do all of that start? How did Adaptive Sports come to be? Alice Krauss: Well, I have been alive and worked as an occupational therapist in rehabilitation long enough to have experienced up close and personal the drastic changes in healthcare that happened in the 90s.

So as reimbursement there was a lot of Medicare fraud across the healthcare system, and the federal government basically clamped down on all that, and so drove down reimbursement. So, many people were not even eligible to come into rehabilitation or to receive outpatient services.

So if a person had a stroke or spinal cord injury and they would come into our care, they might stay six months, eight months. Like 17 days. So the idea in occupational therapy is to pick the right challenge, pick the right activity at the right level that challenges the individual and then give them opportunities to practice those skills within a personally meaningful activity in ever more complex environments over time.

So the outcomes were just not, well they were different. They were just not as good. And I would notice that the same people who had graduated from our services, traditionally inpatient and outpatient, and had made great gains, because we do really good work at Brooks. They had made great gains, but had really fallen off the map after they left here, because they were not getting the support they needed to sustain those gains.

And I was just frustrated. My mind just continues to work on it. And in fact, their lives were characterized by social isolation and physical inactivity. And in our occupational therapy philosophy, we believe that the work-life-balance is something. We put a lot of credibility into that. Can you give us six months to figure out how to fund you? Obviously I love Brooke. Tracy Davis: Sure. But when I came back in , Adaptive Sports has been, everyone talks about it all the time about how beneficial it is.

And we always have amazing events and we have surfing coming up in-. And I always go to that. I actually invited our whole team to come and marketing. Different people do that. Alice Krauss: Yeah, you made it. Alice Krauss: But we have regular programming six days a week, several activities during the day, and every single evening we have at least one and sometimes we have three.

It still is the largest and most comprehensive in the country. Tracy Davis: Absolutely. What are some things coming up with the Adaptive Sports program that you can tell us about? Maybe some new fun things or changes?

Alice Krauss: Well, this coming Monday we are doing for the second time indoor skydiving, which is kind of exciting. That is in partnership with iFLY Jacksonville. And in 13 years we have never had a wait list as long as we did for our event in the spring. So we had a wait list, within a few hours we had a wait list of 41 people for the iFLY-. Tracy Davis: Oh, okay. Michelle Orallo: If anyone listening is interested in volunteering or participating, when is the best way to contact you?

Alice Krauss: So if you are interested in getting involved with our program and you are somebody that is living with a disability, or you just want to find out more about our programming, you can call our office.