10/31/2022
Professional Tribute
Christina Howe, OTR/L, CWCE
In addition to the wonderful personal tributes offered over the past few days since she passed, I wanted to provide her friends and family with a perspective on Chris's contribution to our profession.
I first met Chris in the mid-80s and was struck by her uncommon combination of curiosity and confidence, and a somewhat different focus from the young occupational therapists I had been teaching. In those days, most OT's early in their careers were working with children or elders; Chris was drawn to the challenge of occupational rehabilitation focused on return to work. We shared the belief that helping a person to return to work who has lost their career after a serious injury or illness was a wonderful and irreplaceable gift to them and their family.
Over the years, Chris developed an uncommon set of skills and understanding that were effective in addressing many of the challenges that we face in this field. She was committed to the idea of high-quality postgraduate training for occupational therapists and physical therapists, especially in the fields of work capacity evaluation and functional capacity evaluation and workplace ergonomics. These are now core features of our professional practice, exemplified in the "Thinking Evaluator", which distinguished the complex problem-solving of our graduates from the "cookie-cutter" approach some less-well-trained professionals continued to use.
As part of her leadership and teaching advanced concepts and skills, Chris's contributions to board certification in our field were irreplaceable. She led a group of like-minded colleagues to establish the Certified Work Capacity Evaluator certification criteria and process (CWCE). Over the years, CWCE has become the most prized credential for practitioners, especially those who participate in forensic rehabilitation. Safe to say that CWCE would not have come about except for Chris's leadership and persistence, coupled with her ability to get all of us to volunteer somewhat more of our time than we had intended, to help move the field forward. She engaged us and moved us along with that wonderful smile and graciousness. If you go to the Matheson System YouTube channel, you can see Chris in action as an Educator and get a sense of her insistence on the highest possible professionalism to tackle very difficult and important problems.
One final note. Chris always considered Occupational Rehabilitation to be an international profession. She worked with colleagues throughout North America seamlessly, sensitive to the differences across political boundaries. She began to work beyond North America and made some very important contributions, for example to the Occupational Rehabilitation movement in Thailand. I was personally aware of her generosity as Chris mentored my daughter-in-law, Erin Nichols Matheson in these international efforts. I know that Erin feels a great loss with Chris's passing. And we all were the better for knowing Chris and having had her in our lives. We didn't have the opportunity to be members of her family, but she had a professional "family" that she served very well, and we now move our profession into a much brighter future than we could have anticipated without her.
