2013 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting: Health Professionals In the Spotlight

Q: What has ARHP meant to your career?

A: My involvement with both the ARHP and the ACR has allowed me to facilitate relationships and contacts, which has taken my career to places that it never would have been if I had not been involved with the organization or the rheumatologists here at Michigan. Michigan has always helped support me to attend the meetings, and it has given me the opportunity to meet colleagues from across the country doing similar work. The ARHP helped me to establish really significant relationships that facilitated my career. I got involved with one professor from New Mexico, and she and I have collaborated on some research. We also presented at not just the ARHP together, but also at the American Occupational Therapy Association.

Q: How has patient care in your sphere of influence advanced since you first started?

A: We’re much more evidence based. We always did things because we thought they worked, but now there’s a real push, in the last 10–15 years, of really becoming accountable, objectively, in the change that we facilitate. That said, we have had to learn how to treat patients in a more effective manner, because the amount of time we have to treat these patients is less and less.

Q: What does an award for advocacy mean to you?

A: I was quite humbled, because when I look at ARHP as an organization, there are a lot of very accomplished clinicians, incredible researchers—a lot of different people that make the ARHP a premier organization.

Dr. Gignac

ARHP Distinguished Scholar Award

Monique Gignac, PhD

Senior Scientist, University Health Network , Institute for Work and Health, and Associate Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto in Ontario

Background: Dr. Gignac is an expert in the areas of health and social psychology—rheumatology just kind of happened. She was interested in how patients with arthritis managed the stress in their lives and never gave up the hunt, particularly as people seemed to wonder why the condition would be that difficult to deal with at all.

“Over the years, I’ve had a lot of people who don’t understand why this condition would be stressful at all,” she says. “They see this as something that is mostly affecting older adults. They remember they had a relative who had these kinds of aches and pains, and they don’t see the stress or understand it.”