OPENING ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE AT THE ISCP 25TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2008
OPENING ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE AT THE IRISH SOCIETY OF CHARTERED PHYSIOTHERAPISTS 25TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2008
Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur láthair ar an ocáid seo. Tá me buíoch dibh as an cuireadh agus an fáilte fíorchaoin a chur sibh romham.
Thank you for that very warm welcome, and special thanks to Karen Gunn for her kind invitation to launch this annual conference which also marks the silver jubilee of the founding of the Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapist. It is a particular pleasure to see visible evidence of ongoing collaboration with the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists in Northern Ireland as co-hosts of this conference for the third time. You meet and work together in an admirable and reassuring spirit of collegiality - a spirit that is a sign of the neighbourly future we are all trying to build as well as a guarantee that our services on both sides of the border are drawing from the widest resource in terms of insight, wisdom, skill and experience.
The title of your Conference “Forward Together: Meeting the Challenge” could undeniably resonate much more widely than this forum through the fields of politics and economics but often, in focussing on those bigger pictures, we lose sight of sheer importance and sheer extent of collaborations that happen effectively and quietly under the radar - collaborations like yours that just get on with it because you want the very best for your patients and you know that scholarly curiosity about practices and experiences elsewhere is an important source of new thinking and new energy. Your patients come to you with a vast range of problems from the legendary acute bad back through post-trauma rehabilitation to chronic conditions like spina bifida, cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis.
Your daily work takes you deep into the world of suffering. You are healers. You don’t have magic wands nor instant solutions. Instead you have skills and experience that have to deal not just with the presenting condition but also with the inevitable anxieties and fears, the dreads and the doubts that each patient brings with him or her. You have to help them persevere through slow, painstaking treatment plans. You have to help them to find the personal courage and character to face difficult days. Many thousands of people have you to thank for helping them through that journey to recovery or to an enhanced quality of life. James Bryce put it well when he said that “medicine is the only profession that labours incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.” And that is true for your profession which labours to return people to health or at least to freedom from as much as possible of the adverse consequence of ill-health.
You have reason to know in a very intimate and special way just how much courage and remarkable character there is out in our communities. You know how many people are living good lives while also living with serious health problems. They are good students, good mums and dads, good colleagues, good friends, good community workers, good citizens. Their lives enhance all our lives and your company on their life’s journey is an important expression of our collective care for one another. I know you are here because you want the quality of that care to be the very best it can be and so you come to share what you know and listen to what others know. In that sharing there is the open door to fresh thinking, to re-evaluation of current practice, to the distillation of your combined wisdom which may lead to the next series of steps on the road to even better services.
Your daily work is important to all of us. Your being here is important to all of us. I thank the members of both societies for making our care your vocation and for making your profession ever restlessly curious in its pursuit of best practice. Enjoy the Silver Jubilee celebrations and enjoy the conference.
It now gives me great pleasure to officially open this 25th annual conference.
Go raibh maith agaibh.