For over 20 years, Alyson Stover has been a skilled occupational therapist, gaining valuable knowledge about the field of occupational therapy (OT) and applying it to her work in the classroom as an associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Occupational Therapy.
Stover expanded her OT leadership experience with her recent position as president of the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), which she served from 2022-2025, including one year as president-elect.
Now, she is eager to bring her insight from her time as president back to Pitt OT and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS).
Recognizing a Need
Stover attended Pitt law school when she recognized a need to better advocate for her OT patients, which continued to inspire her as she sought the presidential role with AOTA.
“At first, I was very focused on this idea of individual patient advocacy or advocating for my presence as an OT in certain spaces,” Stover said. “And in law school, it really opened my mind to the idea that we sometimes are afraid of systemic change.”
Stover’s time in law school enabled her to recognize the systemic gaps present in health care, recognizing where challenges were present for her patients.
“I saw that our health care system was in a state of peril, and I now had the legal training to understand that peril in a way that is harder for practicing clinicians to understand and I could interpret it for my colleagues,” Stover said. “Through realizing that, it felt like it was the right time for me to pursue this role.”
Advancing AOTA’s Visibility
In her role as president, Stover worked to advance AOTA’s visibility to practicing and aspiring OTs.
“We have a profession that has a substantial gap in the number of practicing clinicians that we need and the number of actual practicing clinicians that we have,” Stover said. “My role is to figure out how we can recruit more OTs, and that starts by making the clinical world an easier place to be.”
In working to achieve this, Stover had to recognize the limits of her own expertise in occupational therapy.
“A lot of times people in leadership positions think they’re there because they have an expertise in something,” Stover said. “I had an expertise in what OT looked like because of my experience as a clinician, but I had no idea what it looked like in spaces I had never been, and I needed to acknowledge that.”
Stover spent time visiting occupational therapy sites across the United States, each in unique sectors of the field and witnessed the needs of the occupational therapists working there. In Cincinnati she followed a pelvic floor OT for an entire day, a specialty she knew nothing about but wanted to learn and to ask the hard questions. In South Dakota she spent a day with an OT on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the poorest reservation in the country, and then an evening with OTs in a Rapid City hospital where they have 60 evaluations a day, yet patients are still left untreated. At a Veterans Affairs hospital in New Mexico, she learned they serve not only all the veterans in the state, but also in Texas, Colorado and Arizona, and how burnout is preventing them from doing the work that needs to happen.
“I wanted to know what OT looked like for everyone, and I wanted to walk with them. You have to be willing to love every part of the profession, even the parts that you don’t want to practice. It’s really about falling in love with not just my OT story, but the OT story.”
Alyson Stover
Occupational Therapy Compact
One of Stover’s greatest accomplishments during her presidency was her involvement in the creation of the Occupational Therapy Compact, an interstate agreement allowing licensed OTs and OT assistants to practice among other Compact member states. The OT Compact is a joint initiative between AOTA and the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy. It was rapidly adopted by 29 states upon its creation in 2019.
“When I think about where I want OT to be, and I think about places like New Mexico or Oregon where we have huge barriers to access because there are not enough clinicians, I think about how the Compact allows for things like telehealth to happen more freely,” Stover said. “It allows our traveling therapists to easily move into some of those rural, underserved areas. I’m really proud of how quickly it was put into motion and getting to be the spokesperson for Compact has been exceptional.”
Stover said that its widespread acceptance could mean that other health fields will seek a similar opportunity.
“We went from a space of ‘Maybe we should have a Compact’ to being the exemplar that other professions are looking to,” Stover said.
Returning to Pitt OT
After three years as AOTA president and traveling the globe representing occupational therapy, Stover has a tremendous understanding of the state of the profession from diverse environments, as well as where the profession can go. She is already bringing these findings to the students of Pitt OT.
“We’re going to advance what we already do well: giving our students real insight into what is cutting edge, what’s going to be accepted, where the battles are and where they need to focus their efforts.”
Alyson Stover
“Pitt OT Department Chair Juleen Rodakowski and the faculty have made it seamless to integrate my experiences into the curriculum and give that access to our students,” Stover said.
Among the topics Stover brought back into the classroom was the influence and development of health technology and artificial intelligence, discussing with her students how advancements to assistive technology could be integrated into the OT curriculum.
“I went to the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest tech conference in the world, and they taught me what the tech and health tech industry need from the OT lens,” Stover said. “I was able to build that into our Project Development I Course, where students could brainstorm ways to increase accessibility in the community. There were guest speakers and individuals that I met along the way who were willing to speak to students in a lecture format, and then hearing students’ responses to that interaction helps with our overall program design.”
The Future of Occupational Therapy
Through Stover’s work within and outside of AOTA, she has analyzed the current state of occupational therapy and where she sees the future of the field in the coming years.
“Where we currently are as a health care system is not sustainable for five more years, and that is largely reliant upon that idea that we do not have enough medical professionals in any capacity to ensure that people’s basic health needs are met,” Stover said. “One of the things that we can see is how OT can really understand this and be the mechanism of what new health care can look like. If OT grabs this right and is willing to be loud, then we can mimic what we saw happen in Norway, where OT is the primary care provider and becomes the central element of health care.”
Stover said that this idea extends to other health and rehabilitation fields as well, shifting the health care system to be designed not just for prevention, but wellness as a whole.
“If fields like OT, physical therapy, speech-language pathology and social work combine and emerge as the clinical leaders in the health care space, then what we will see happen is that health technology will rely on us—rather than health technology taking over without our voices, which is what I fear.”
Alyson Stover
“With our clinical expertise directing the way, health technology can be a tool to take us to the next level of ensuring wellness, regardless of where you live or what you’re doing or who you are,” Stover said.
She continues, “I see OT finding ways to utilize the data from health technology and what we know about people’s routines, habits and environments. We can create wellness that reduces cost without saying ‘prevention’ because we’re all going to have a disease, a diagnosis, a condition. I might not be able to prevent it, but I can make sure that you’re doing well going into it.”
With Stover’s accomplished tenure as president of AOTA under her belt, she is looking to continue advancing the OT profession, both within and beyond SHRS.
“I’m going to enjoy being fully present here, and I have so many ideas—not just for Pitt OT, but for SHRS and our health sciences as a whole,” Stover said. “We’ve always been innovative and we’ve always been leaders, but to have such a global perspective of what’s happening, I’m excited about sharing it and seeing how it can grow and how I can contribute to progressing the entire health sciences forward with the opportunities I’ve experienced.”