She’s a Chatham Alum, a Professor, and President of the PA OT Association
Christine “Chrissy” Daeschner, PPOTD ’22, is a visiting assistant professor of practice in Chatham University’s occupational therapy program. (Mick Stinelli)
It was over two decades ago, but Christine “Chrissy” Daeschner, PPOTD ’22, vividly remembers the day an occupational therapist came into one of her high school classes and told the students about the work of OT.
Daeschner, then a sophomore, came from a family full of nurses and knew she was interested in healthcare, but she didn’t want to work with needles or blood. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue athletic training or physical therapy either.
Something clicked when she heard this practitioner talking about helping patients as whole persons, she said.
“I remember thinking, Yes, I don’t just want to help people walk or get their leg strength up,” Daeschner said. “It really spoke to me to be able to say, I want to help them to be able to live a better life or help them do things that they couldn’t do—caring for a child, getting dressed by themselves, doing those things.”
She found something she could truly picture herself doing, and now she’s been doing it passionately in various capacities—as a practitioner, a professor, a student, and an advocate—for over 25 years.
“We all work really hard in our lives, in different ways, but in the end, to be able to help someone live the way they want, gracefully, to me, is very important,” Daeschner said during an interview in her office at Chatham Eastside, where she’s a visiting assistant professor of practice and a doctoral capstone advisor.
What’s kept her interested in the field is not only working with students, but she continues to work with patients; she specializes in geriatric OT.
“We’re coming into an era where it’s unprecedented the number of geriatric patients that we have, and they need to be cared for and they need to be cared for appropriately,” she said. “Some people really want to stay at home. It’s our job to make sure they’re able to do that.”
Before she developed that specialty, Daeschner worked in UPMC Montefiore’s transplant unit for a few years. In order to spend more time with her young children, both of whom were under the age of two, she went into home healthcare.
“It truly is a space where you see a person really at their most vulnerable,” she said. “There is no perception or guessing what’s going on. You are in [a patient’s] home. And it’s actually a very challenging work environment. Everywhere else, they’re in your space, but when you’re in someone’s home, I’m in their space. So, it’s definitely a different dynamic and a different workflow, but I truly enjoyed it.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic began, Daeschner went into home modification evaluations, helping construction specialists determine patients’ needs—a stairlift, a new shower, wider doors—in order to age in place.
“Some people really want to stay at home. It’s our job to make sure they’re able to do that.”
That was also around the time she enrolled in Chatham University’s Post-Professional Doctor of Occupational Therapy (PPOTD) program.
“Since I graduated, I always had a hope or a desire to go back” to school, she said. “It was never really in the cards. At that time, things just kind of aligned. I know, for most people, there’s not a lot of highlights from the pandemic, but it kind of slowed my life down.… To me, it was a now-or-never kind of thing.”
Even though she was already familiar with Chatham, where she started as an adjunct faculty member over 10 years ago, she said she looked at every PPOTD program available in Pennsylvania.
Chatham’s model, where she and other members of her small cohort would be able to obtain a degree in less than two years, stood above the rest because of its structure and rigor.
“Considering I knew most of the professors, I felt a lot of stress to perform at a very high level,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know how they felt, but I felt stressed. But it was also comforting to know that they’re great at their jobs.”
“It really gave me an opportunity to grow in ways that I never imagined,” she added. “Even in my cohort, there were people from all over the country. I never would have met them. They were so inspiring. They all do different things. It really was a special time.”
She also completed the program while serving as president of the Pennsylvania Occupational Therapy Association (POTA), where she advocates for over 7,000 occupational therapists working in the commonwealth.
A member of POTA since she was an undergraduate, Daeschner didn’t truly get involved with the association until she helped with a conference they were holding in Pittsburgh in 2009. She soon became the treasurer and, later, the executive officer for the POTA district covering southwestern Pennsylvania.
In 2018, the board tapped her to chair the association’s newly formed commission on legislation and advocacy. Two years later, she was elected president of POTA. Her work has consisted of advocating for better patient billing, getting OT identified by the state as holistic pain management, and improving Medicare reimbursements. She’ll step down next year to make room for her successor.
“It hasn’t always been the easiest position to hold, but it’s been an honor,” Daeschner said. “I’ve gained so much from it. I’ve learned so much from it. I’ve gotten to do a lot of, what I would consider, important pieces of our profession.”
Chatham University offers both entry-level and post-professional doctorate programs for occupational therapy. Discover opportunities in both of those programs and more at chatham.edu.