A new year’s post from the Hope Restored blog manager, Sandra Mitchell

A couple of months ago, I sat in a meeting with Mary Free Bed’s fearless CEO, Kent Riddle, going over a speech he’d written. When my eyes hit this sentence – “It’s a new era at Mary Free Bed” – it was obvious that not only had Kent nailed the speech, but he’d also defined something essential about present day Mary Free Bed.

Not just a shiny new year, but an auspicious new era

As January 1 nears, don’t you find most people waffle between the heady promise of new beginnings and a sense of failure over unfulfilled resolutions from the previous year?

At Mary Free Bed, I think it’s safe to say we have that heady-new-beginning thing going on.

We can feel change all around us. With the new Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital Network growing and a strategic alliance formed with the renowned Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Mary Free Bed staff members are all ignited by this new era.

For Kent to refer to the current evolution of Mary Free Bed as a new era, well, that really put a fine point on it for me, and I suspect for others here as well.

Mary Free Bed’s leader looks ahead

With timing on my side – I found myself in Kent’s office for a couple of minutes – and the new year just days away, I asked Kent what he foresaw for Mary Free Bed in the coming 12 months.

For those of you who’ve never come in contact with Kent, the first thing you’ll figure out is that he’s in love with Mary Free Bed. I mean he’s full out, full fledged in love. He has his reasons for this passion and dedication, but that’s another blog post.

So, to put such question to Mary Free Bed’s CEO elicits a combination of Cheshire grins and furrowed brow as he contemplates all that’s ahead. While the new year is indeed full of the promise of new beginnings, the complications that make up the business world mean many of those plans are still under wraps. But what we can share is good.

(Note: Next year, look for a video of Kent talking about new things to come in the new year. What’s missing in the list below is Kent’s fervor and gusto for Mary Free Bed and its patients. His excitement is truly infectious.)

2012 at Mary Free Bed

You can be assured the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Network will continue to add partners, bringing our rehabilitation expertise to even more Michigan residents.

At the downtown Mary Free Bed campus, we’ll also be taking more patients as our admission criteria changes and programs expand. This also means more jobs as Mary Free Bed will need more therapists and clinical staff to treat patients.

Mary Free Bed is in the beginning stages of enhancing our research programs, so, as you may have heard us say recently, we can do more than administer cures, we can also discover them.

While Mary Free Bed offers intense rehabilitation for diagnoses of all kinds, we’ll soon be offering even more. Programs will expand to include oncology, pulmonology, and cardiology, just to name a few.

And, the hospital is adding some intense and cutting-edge therapeutic technology for patients. Mary Free Bed will be one of the first rehabilitation facilities in Michigan to offer patients robot-assisted walking therapy using the Lokomat^®. Check out that video!

LokomatPro Product Demo from Hocoma on Vimeo.

Also coming is the TheraStride™, a body weight support system for locomotor training. This new rehabilitation technology is based on the knowledge about the capacity of the spinal cord to develop new pathways and to recover a specific motor task, such as walking, by repetitive sensory input.

So long 2011, hello New Year!

There you have it: new era, new year, new beginnings. All of us at Mary Free Bed will see you in 2012 to continue our work on our new era.

Happy New Year and peace on Earth, friends. May you be overwhelmed with joy this holiday season.