This week, Mobility Management’s 2024 story “Barbie Goes to Seating Clinic” earned a national silver award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE), after receiving an ASBPE regional silver award in April.
I realize that paragraph might not make a lot of sense to you — sort of like having only one HCPCS code for all of power seat elevation, including for bariatric clients, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. But I want to publicly thank Lauren Rosen, PT, MPT, MSMS, ATP/SMS, program coordinator at the Motion Analysis Center, St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital of Tampa, for doing a seating and wheeled mobility evaluation, via telehealth, of Barbie the wheelchair rider.
Thank you, Lauren, for your time and insight, for giving wheelchair rider Barbie and other mobility-centric toys to families who come to your clinic, and for not saying that the idea of assessing Barbie and her wheelchair was a waste of your time. (Or thanks for not saying that last part aloud.)
And to everyone who’s read the story, thanks for not running me out of your industry afterward.
The ASBPE awards are judged by fellow business publication editors. I don’t know who judged Barbie’s story, but I’m betting they weren’t very familiar with seating evals before this judging assignment came to them. In fact, this might have been the first time they judged a story with “Barbie” in its headline, given that other award-winning stories included “Real World Impact of Faulty Commerce Department Financial System Rollout” (Bloomberg Government) and “Quantum Computing Technology Pushes for IT Advantage” (SearchCIO).
While it was huge fun to listen to Lauren assess Barbie’s current chair and explain changes she’d suggest, this is surely the quote from Lauren that clinched the awards: “This exists, and it just says, ‘If Barbie can use a wheelchair, I can too.’ And Barbie does everything. She’s an astronaut, a doctor. This woman is all of those things. ‘If Barbie can do all of that, and she uses a wheelchair, I can do anything.’”
Thanks also to you for supporting Mobility Management’s long history of clinical coverage and, once in a while, a tangential seating and wheeled mobility story that sneaks onto a larger public stage for a moment. It makes me happy to imagine people being introduced to Complex Rehab Technology via Barbie and her (very) ultralightweight purple wheelchair.
