2024 ANPT Annual Conference Keynote Speaker

Janet R. Douglas, MPH, OTR

An Occupational Therapist's  Search for  Identity, Purpose and Joie de Vivre after a Devastating Stroke.

Jan Douglas trained as an occupational therapist in her native England. The patients she least enjoyed working with were those who had suffered strokes. She found them slow, lacking in motivation and emotionally unstable. She specialized in the treatment of hand injuries, working at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London and then served with the World Health Organization in its Africa and Southeast Asia regions. While working in Thailand, she met her American husband, an oral surgeon.  

After moving to the United States, Douglas became Director of Occupational Therapy Education at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and pursued a master’s degree in public health. From there she joined the world’s largest human resources and risk management consulting firm. As a global business leader, she worked with public and private employers, government agencies and healthcare systems, to improve their human capital management. She currently provides human resources support to a refugee resettlement agency.

Douglas has authored four books, three text books on topics related to human capital management and most recently, a memoir about her lived experience of stroke.

Douglas’ memoir, “A Wonderful Stroke of Luck -From Occupational Therapist to Patient and Beyond” is a thoughtful, scary, funny, hopeful story of an occupational therapist who suffers a massive stroke while attending a  family wedding in England.  She emerges from coma weeks later, as the patient she least liked to treat, in a hospital in Chicago, where she had once worked.

We are glad to announce Jan as the Keynote Speaker for The 4th ANPT Annual Conference presenting on “An Occupational Therapist's  Search for  Identity, Purpose and Joie de Vivre after a Devastating Stroke."