Meet the new occupational therapy department head, Dr. Cara Brown.
Nearly 30 years after receiving her first degree at the University of Manitoba, Dr. Cara Brown began a two-year term as acting head of the occupational therapy department at the College of Rehabilitation Sciences on July 1.
The three-time UM alum graduated with a bachelor’s degree in occupational therapy (OT) in 1996, and then a master’s (2008) and PhD (2019), both in community health sciences.
Brown worked for more than a decade in a variety of clinical areas – including orthopedic trauma, neurosurgery and outpatient rehabilitation – at the Health Sciences Centre, before becoming a full-time UM faculty member in 2019.
Her research program is largely focused on supporting community-living for older adults. Since 2022, she has been the Manitoba principal investigator of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), a Canada-wide study on the complexities of the aging process.
UM Today recently spoke to Brown about her career and vision for the OT program.
I spent most of my life in Winnipeg although my family moved around a bit when I was a child, living in Whitehorse and Prince Albert. I also spent a lot of time in Flin Flon, where my family roots are. So, even though I’ve spent most of my life in Winnipeg, sometimes I feel a little bit like I have a small-town mindset.
After I graduated in 1996 with my occupational therapy degree, I practiced in the United States for a year, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They were recruiting rehabilitation folks then, and it seemed like a great opportunity for an adventure. I worked in a skilled nursing facility, which is a combination of geriatric rehabilitation and long-term care. That's where I started working with older adults.
After a year I was happy to come home to Canada, but it was a good experience to get a taste of a different health-care system. It gave me an appreciation for our public health-care system here.
When I worked at the Health Sciences Centre, one thing that frustrated me was trying to balance system and individual needs, like when someone is marginally ready for discharge from hospital but the system needs the bed. Curiosity about how to support individuals despite system pressures led me to start a master’s degree. That degree led to opportunities teaching and contributing to research projects in the OT department, and a desire to continue in academia led me to do a PhD.
The main thing that I’m focused on right now is my work with the CLSA. We’re following thousands of participants for another several years, until 2033. I oversee the data collection that occurs at Deer Lodge Centre and at Fort Garry Campus for phone and in-person data collection. I collaborate with the national team to coordinate high quality national data collection and I lead participant engagement for the CLSA.
It’s an exciting time for occupational therapy because our strategic plan, the university’s strategic plan and the Rady strategic plan are so aligned with the values and work of occupational therapy. Our professional roots are in working with communities, and in advocacy and social justice. For us, it’s been exciting to see these things become more of a priority in the institution in which we work. This alignment between our profession and the strategic plan will inspire us to continue to build on our previous innovations, like developing outreach placements that put OTs in new places, engaging students in community partner projects to learn about working with communities in good ways, and collaborating with our First Nations partners to advance student cultural competency and reconciliation.
Our department has been under so much change for the last two or three years, including increasing our student body size, and reimagining our curriculum to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, and anti-oppressive OT practice. After all this collective work, dreaming and visioning we have done as a department, I’m just excited to support the implementation of this revised curriculum, and to invite everyone in the clinical community to come along on this ride with us.
Learn more about UM's occupational therapy program:
umanitoba.ca/graduate-studies/admissions/programs-of-study/occupational-therapy-mot
At UM, we encourage life-long curiosity while providing tools – inside and outside the classroom – to succeed in a rapidly changing world. Empowering learners is one of the strategic themes you’ll find in MomentUM: Leading change together, the University of Manitoba’s 2024–2029 strategic plan.
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