Brittne Jackson, M.P.H., fondly remembers Sunday afternoons spent with her grandmother Madeline Jackson, visiting her relatives at the local nursing home. “I vividly remember watching my grandmother with her sisters,” she recalls. As a young child, Jackson found this setting extremely intriguing. “I wondered, ‘why can’t they sit up or walk around like me?’ ” During her visits, Jackson watched as physical therapists (PTs) came to work with her relatives in the nursing home’s gym to help them regain their mobility. Having the opportunity to see how elderly people become less agile with age, as well as the part PTs played in helping them regain some of their lost mobility, stuck with Jackson. The experience gave her a greater appreciation and respect for the elderly, fostered her sense of community, and ultimately “set the course for my career in physical therapy.”
For Jackson, a second-year PT student at GW’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS), pursuing a career in PT is a privilege. “You are able to develop relationships with your patients and impact their quality of life by improving or restoring their mobility through hands-on, one-on-one treatment,” she says.
Community service is what drives Jackson. “Our program takes pride in going out into our community and making it known that PTs can and want to help you,” she says. There are certain skills that PTs bring to the table that people don’t know they are trained to do. The role of a PT, says Jackson, is not just to help restore a patient’s mobility, but to promote overall wellness in the community.
“Brittne exemplifies what it means to give back to your community,” says Ellen Costello, Ph.D., associate director for the program in physical therapy and associate professor of physical therapy and health care sciences at SMHS. “Her maturity and professionalism are to be admired.”
From the first day she stepped onto the Foggy Bottom campus in the fall of 2012, Jackson felt at home. “I found GW’s interview process to be one of the most inviting,” she recalls. “The staff and faculty make an effort to get to know you as a person and encourage you to express the many sides of your personality.” The warm welcome, coupled with the program’s combination of hands-on training and community engagement, was the perfect fit for Jackson.
Born and raised not far from GW in Rockville, Md., Jackson earned her bachelor’s degree in health sciences with a concentration in pre-physical therapy from Howard University and a master of public health degree with a concentration in behavioral health from Morgan State University in Baltimore. Jackson says her grandmother, the second-youngest of 13 children, was responsible for taking care of her older siblings. “I watched my grandmother take care of her sisters, as well as other residents in that nursing home, simply by interacting with them,” she says.
Jackson says those experiences as a young child have greatly influenced the way she wants to practice PT. “When you go into a nursing home and see people who have lost most or all of their bodily functions, it really puts what I do into perspective,” she says. “It has taught me the importance of treating the ‘whole person’ and not just their impairment, which is the key to physical therapy.”
