World body's president Kit Sinclair is a leader in her profession and continues to play vital role in Hong Kong
When Kit Sinclair, the first Hong Kong resident and US-born person to be elected president of the 130,000-member World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT), took a short break in Hong Kong nearly 40 years ago, little did she anticipate the holiday would have a lasting impact on her career. It played an integral role in promoting the level of knowledge and benefits of occupational therapy (OT) in Hong Kong and beyond.
In addition to being a founding faculty member of the three-year occupational therapy honours degree programme at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), over the years Professor Sinclair has been a leader in expanding occupational therapy training and education in the mainland.
Her dedication to outreach programmes has won accolades from the mainland medical profession and awards from Rotary International, which has given her a Fellowship and an International Service Award for her dedication to developing rehabilitation therapy. The professor said her greatest source of pride was seeing those she had taught develop their careers to make a real difference to the communities they worked in. 'Part of the pleasure of teaching is seeing others using motivation and the skills they acquire to develop innovative solutions that make a real difference to people's lives,' she said.
As a fresh occupational therapist graduate from Washington University in St Louis, the professor joined the US Peace Corps and spent two years in rural South Korea, working in orphanages and clinics. She came to Hong Kong in 1969 for a short sojourn, but decided to stay and worked in children's hospitals, schools and for the then Medical and Health Department of the Hong Kong government, before joining the department of rehabilitation sciences at the then Hong Kong Polytechnic in 1978 - the same year the honours degree programme was launched.
'In those early days there were probably less than 30 trained occupational therapists, mostly foreigners, working in Hong Kong. I was finding my feet in a health care system that was very hospital based, but Hong Kong was changing and people were becoming more demanding regarding health services, which helped to increase the stature of occupational therapy,' she said. By moving from a hands-on environment into academia, Professor Sinclair felt that she could contribute more to the profession. She said validation of her move was rewarded when the first graduates began developing jobs and services relevant to Hong Kong people's needs.
Hong Kong has about 1,200 locally trained occupational therapists. Since the PolyU programme was launched in the late 1970s, more than 12,000 students have graduated from the curriculum. Professor Sinclair has helped train nearly every one.