By Ryan Clark
CHS Communications Director

It all started with a dance injury.

That’s what led Katelyn McNamara, PT, DPT, to her career in Physical Therapy. Now, the Lexington native is a Pediatric Physical Therapist at Norton Children’s Hospital in Louisville, and in celebration of National Physical Therapy Month, we sat down to ask about her interest in PT, and why it’s important to celebrate the profession.

She’s a two-time Kentucky alumna (graduating with a Doctor of Physical Therapy Program in 2016 and a dual Honors undergraduate degree in Topical Studies in Neuroscience and Spanish in 2013) and she was our most recent recipient of the College of Health Sciences Young Alumni Award.

Here’s 5 questions with … Katelyn McNamara, PT, DPT:

1. Why did you want to be a PT?

Well, that's actually quite a long story, but it starts with a dance injury when I was 13 years old and it was complicated by having chronic regional pain syndrome.

For the longest time, doctors weren't sure what exactly was causing my pain, so when I finally got to see a physical therapist, I felt like he was the most calm and even-keeled person to deal with. We spent, you know, three days a week, for an hour each, so I felt like he was really there through my process of recovery.

And after that I realized that's what I wanted to be — and that was back in the eighth grade.

I found my calling to work as a pediatric physical therapist in volunteering as a Spanish interpreter, a medical interpreter, through Shoulder to Shoulder, another University of Kentucky program that works with partners in Ecuador to provide care to limited-resourced areas. And I served as an interpreter, specifically with pediatric therapists, and it was right then and there that I knew that I wanted to work with kids and specifically as a pediatric physical therapist.

2. What’s the best part about being a PT?

There's so many wonderful things, I think. My original thought about becoming a PT still holds true in that I get to work one-on-one with patients every day and affect change for that person every day and see them from start to finish in their recovery process.

Especially with pediatric situations or pediatric physical therapy, I get to work not only with the child but their whole family. That family being empowered to support their child through their recovery is so rewarding.

Another thing about being a physical therapist though, is being able to work in the community, in the manner of promoting physical activity, in promoting adapted sports or adapted environments.

3. Why do we need more?

Goodness, why do we need more physical therapists?

Well, even in the world of pediatric physical therapists and thinking about my home state of Kentucky, the state of Kentucky is in desperate need of pediatric physical therapists, especially working in rural areas, both in Eastern Kentucky and Western Kentucky. There's so much need for therapists who have been trained to work with children with disabilities and thinking about supporting families and those children to navigate their environments.

There's desperate need for early interventionists for school-based practitioners for hospital settings, for outpatient therapists, especially in the world of school-based practice and early intervention where we are supporting children who are diagnosed early on in life.

4. What makes CHS the best place to learn PT?

I actually had a conversation with a parent, a family friend, who had a daughter who went through the DPT program at UK years ago, and she reflected that she felt like CHS, and the Department of Physical Therapy not only prepares great practitioners, but really emphasizes and encourages students to take their degree and apply it in unique and different ways.

So, for this therapist, she is a consultant with the baseball team and other sports teams, specifically training their athletes to prevent or be safe from physical injury as related to their sport. So really, she felt like the University of Kentucky, and CHS really promotes students and encourages students to seek out unique ways that their profession can be applied to the world. But also support the world and the community in different ways.

My training as a physical therapist through CHS has opened my world to thinking about advocacy to educating others, to coming back and giving back to students as a mentor or educator, to volunteering in different programs, to applying myself as a researcher and really leaning in and showing up and being present at the table to say, ‘This is my training and background and this is how I know that I could support X, Y and Z of a program.’

So I think CHS does a really wonderful job of really broadening our horizons of creating an inter-professional workplace, but also creating a space to allow us to grow and to think creatively about what our work can do.

5. Why is it good to have a month like this to celebrate?

Well, I always think it's good to have reasons to celebrate anything. For me, the month of October is also my birthday month, so I always feel like it was meant to be for me to be a physical therapist.

For us as physical therapists, I think it's important to take time to reflect on our work — not only our work with individuals on a day-to-day basis — but how we interact together as colleagues, how we can promote the profession into the future and really just thinking about how we can better the world around us.