Editor's Note

Let Us Eat Cake!

• By Laurie Watanabe
• Feb 01, 2022

As is evident by the logo on our front cover, we start celebrating Mobility Management’s 20th anniversary with this issue. All year long, we’ll be reminiscing via our entire suite of products — this magazine, as well as our newsletters, podcasts, social media accounts… you name it, it’ll have confetti and sprinkles on it.

But this anniversary is truly our chance to thank you. From the very start, Mobility Management has felt to me like the little magazine that could. In our early days, we got some incredibly lucky breaks. An interview or major news story would appear out of nowhere. A new supporter would show up just when we needed that. Internally, we marveled at the blessings that came at exactly the right times.

Some of those earliest blessings were the editorial contributions of Rick Graver, ATP, owner of Medtech Services Inc. in Reno, Nev. Rick wrote the column “Tools of the Trade,” about the importance of service and repairs in the seating and mobility space, for our very first issue. In a new podcast, Rick and I revisited that column to see how well it aged… even as Rick shared that he recently found an old stash of belt drives he’d stored and forgotten about. His younger service techs were “amazed” to hear Rick talk about belt drives and relays! (Listen to the podcast.)

Our year will be filled with as many of these stories as we can fit onto our pages, into our newsletters, and onto our Web site. And we’ll be celebrating colleagues’ anniversaries as well: NRRTS turns 30 this year! So does National Seating & Mobility. Amylior turns 25. What are you celebrating this year? Tell us so we can celebrate with you!

As is also evident on our front cover, our big story this issue is the wide reach of COVID-19, which is impacting seating and mobility in seemingly infinite ways. Materials cost more; so does shipping. Clients who missed therapy appointments may have progressed and may now need to be reassessed. Labor shortages, a frighteningly transmissible omicron variant, and reimbursement rates that don’t keep pace with the times have challenged all of Complex Rehab Technology’s professional stakeholders, while ultimately hurting consumers, whose medically necessary equipment may be delayed.

As the pandemic starts its third year, the strain and stress of being under siege has taken its toll on everyone. Celebrating during times like this can sound foolhardy, like so much whistling in the dark. At the same time, a whole year of remembering with friends, of chatting with colleagues, sounds like a good way to combat some of the gloom.

So, please join us. If we’re all in this together — and we are — we might as well be together with cake.

This article originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 2022 issue of Mobility Management.