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GW School of Medicine & Health Sciences Center for Faculty Excellence
April 2024 Faculty Spotlight
Excellence in teaching & learning, scholarly endeavors, and leadership are all around us at SMHS. The Center for Faculty Excellence would like to Spotlight our faculty and staff contributions to SMHS, George Washington University, and beyond. Each month we will spotlight faculty or staff from across SMHS, MFA, and Children's. We want to thank our highlighted members for sharing with us their advice and perspectives!
- SMHS Center for Faculty Excellence
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Join the CFE as we highlight Sarah Doerrer, PhD, OTR/L, CHT, CLT. In honor of National Occupational Therapy Month. Sarah will highlight the GW Occupational Therapy program and her journey within the field. Sarah also discusses her research interests, current initiatives to create communities of practice, and her commitment to developing thoughtful and empathetic occupational therapists.
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Biography
Dr. Sarah Doerrer, has been a practicing Occupational Therapist since 2001. Her clinical experience includes working with adults with physical disabilities in the practice areas of inpatient rehabilitation, acute care, home health, and outpatient rehabilitation. Most of her career has been focused in the area of hand and upper extremity orthopedic rehabilitation. She is a certified hand therapist and certified lymphedema therapist. As a researcher, Dr. Doerrer’s interests are in rehabilitation of the hand and upper extremity. She serves on the research division of the American Society of Hand Therapists and has received two foundation grants for her dissertation research “The Impact of Shoulder Pathology on Individuals with Distal Radius Fracture. More recently Dr. Doerrer received a grant from the American Hand Foundation for her clinical trial “Impact of Early ADL Participation on Functional Outcomes Post Distal Radius Fracture” Dr. Doerrer teaches in the post profession and entry level Occupational Therapy Doctorate (eOTDprograms).
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Interview Q/A
How long have you been at GWSMHS? What drew you to your current position?
Sarah: I have been full-time at GWSMHS for 2 years. This was just a semester before the start of the Entry Level Occupational Therapy Doctorate program that started in the Fall 2022. I completed my research residency training at GW SMHS and worked at GW Hospital outpatient for a few years, and always knew that GW University was where I wanted to work as a professor.
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Sarah: My passion for OT started when I was very young. I have an aunt with cerebral palsy, and growing up with her, I knew that I wanted to be in a profession that worked with individuals with disabilities. I decided to pursue OT very early in my life and started an entry-level OT master's program right after graduating from high school.
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What are your major responsibilities here at GWSMHS?
Sarah: My primary responsibility is teaching, and that's where the majority of my time is allotted. Within this pillar, I teach the the movement science course, which outlines the fundamentals of how the body works, and the adult rehabilitation course which develops clinical reasoning skills in students so they can appropriately treat adults with a variety of conditions. In addition to this, our program is very research-focused and I teach all of the research courses.
As far as research, I am currently the PI for a GWU/MFA study with a team that includes myself and Dr. Sam Moghtaderi, a GW MFA orthopedic surgeon, Stephanie Katz a GW clinician, and Katherine McCauley a physician assistant at MFA. Our team has built an educational video of what to do when you fracture your wrist/distal radius and are in a cast. We have been studying the effectiveness of this video on functional outcomes with a clinical trial. We have been running this clinical trial for almost a year, and we're about to start a second one, expanding our sample to include individuals who have had surgery for a distal radius fracture. This is my very first clinical trial and it has been quite a huge learning curve but has taught me so much about research design and the resources available to faculty here at GWU.
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What is your favorite part of teaching at SMHS?
Sarah: My favorite part of teaching is seeing the transformation of students from the time they come into the program into where our first cohort is now, about to start their Level 2 fieldwork. For instance, research is a tough course to teach to students and a lot of students are not interested in it initially. However, I have seen some students grow to enjoy participating in research and scholarship. We had a few students recently attend the State of the Science symposium at the AOTA conference, and they found that the research courses here at GWU really prepared them to engage with the topics presented.
Within our capstone, our students go into this series of courses with the research questions that they want to answer. These capstone projects engage faculty and students to build research initiatives together and the projects include many local community projects. One capstone project we are working on is looking at how we can better facilitate academic and clinician partnerships in research. We are examining how to manage alliance agreements between GWU and local clinics so that the process can be better understood for future projects. I am very excited about the great things that will come from that.
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What about the future of the Department of Health, Human Function, and Rehabilitation Sciences excites you?
Sarah: We have only had two cohorts of students and our program already has received amazing recognition being ranked #27 in the U.S. News & World Report best Occupational Therapy programs. That is something we are very proud of and happy about. Our program and faculty have put in a lot of effort over the past few years, by trying to create great experiences for our students while also developing courses and curriculum.
Overall, I am excited about where we are. We have amazing faculty that are very diverse in their backgrounds and experiences. Our Program Director, Dr. Roger Ideishi, has been a true pillar to our faculty his wealth of knowledge and many years of experience have allowed all of us to excel and grow as academics. Our eOTD students have also been able to participate in a lot of meaningful activities in the program such as attending the White House Easter Egg Roll. Many of the highlights of our program are well documented on our social media page.
Our OT program has also incorporated the cadaver lab which is something that a lot of other OT Programs are not necessarily doing anymore. Additionally, our program is hybrid so it has both online and in-person hands-on experiences which adds to our program’s innovation in hybrid education. Our program has collaborative relationships with GWU Physical Therapy the GWU Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. Overall we try to emphasize the importance of collaborating between different disciplines and incorporating Interprofessional Education that provides the best learning outcomes for students.
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What is your favorite thing about your current role and responsibilities?
Sarah: I teach students for a full year and, in some of their courses I am their main instructor. The transition from the first to the second semester is a difficult one, and I enjoy helping guide the students through that growth year. I try to serve as their advocate by being a support system for them. It is very rewarding to see them grow throughout the year by developing their skills and expanding their knowledge.
Research is another favorite part of my current role. The opportunity to get to do research is very rewarding to me. In terms of service, the ability to give service back to the school is important, I recently joined the Student Rights and Responsibilities panels. It is great to be a part of our academic community here at GW and contribute to it in many ways.
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What impact do you hope to have on your trainees, colleagues, and peers through these roles?
Sarah: When reflecting on my career, I have been able to look back at my own experiences and pose clinical scenarios to my students so that they can think about what to do in situations that can be difficult. I hope that this approach gives students more thoughtful processes around administering care with understanding and empathy.
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What are you looking forward to working on or doing here at GWSMHS?
Sarah: I am looking forward to doing further research and scholarly activities specifically within clinical research and improving patient outcomes after orthopeadic injury.
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What is a piece of advice you would give to your colleagues here at GW?
Sarah: As a junior researcher, I am still learning a lot of things but I am never afraid to give something new a shot. Even if something seems challenging or unfamiliar, it's worth trying. You may fail or it may end up being a huge success. Our institution has such great resources and opportunities that are there for us to utilize to further our passions and interests.
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