Making Shift Happen: Session 169, the Vision of Upstate Cerebral Palsy

This, my friends, is a conversation that I've been looking forward to sharing with you for quite some time. In this episode, I'm joined by Drs. Mara Vanderzell and Erik Jacobson from the Upstate Cerebral Palsy Center. 

As you'll hear right out of the gate, we started the episode off by attempting to operationally characterize the Boy Band pop music genre. You read that correctly... but, don't worry if you're not a fan of Nsync or 98 Degrees... there's a lot of fantastic insights into the clinical leadership model in this conversation. 

And if you are indeed interested in organizational and clinical change on a big scale, this is the episode for you. As Erik and Mara describe, residential and day treatment centers have historically provided treatment from a care model. Over the past few years however, the leadership at UCP has been busy changing this philosophy to an active treatment model. 

As such, they've made considerable investments in bringing in various thought leaders in the field to implement things like Essential for Living, Pre-school Life Skills, the BALANCE program, Skills-Based Treatment, and much much more. In our conversation, we discuss what they've learned from this process, and where the organization is going moving forward. 

We also went down a few unexpected rabbit holes here and there, so you'll want to check out the entire conversation. One of those included Mara telling us about what it was like to be a student of Ted Carr. That's a segment you definitely don't want to miss. 

If you’re a Patreon subscriber, well, you’re not listening to this feed as the ad-free subscriber feed was published last week. That episode also featured an additional 15-20 minutes of content at the end of the interview, where the three of us discuss things like running, cross-fit, and health/fitness more generally. So if you’d like to learn more about this, please check out patreon.com/behavioralobservations.

Last but not least, I'd like to thank Dr. Tony Cammilleri, the Director of Education at FTF and all around great guy, for his help in crafting the questions and talking points for this conversation.

Here are the links to the things we referenced in the show:

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