Liz Donroe: Vocational Rehab

Liz Donroe is a Senior Placement and Rehabilitation Counselor in Rusk’s Vocational Rehabilitation Department at NYU Langone Health. With over 17 years’ experience in the field of rehabilitation, she has expertise in counseling individuals with complex medical conditions including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, and amputation in returning to work. Her focus is on career counseling, work readiness, job placement and employment retention. Liz served on NYU Langone Medical Center’s Accessibility Committee and is an active member of the New York City Placement Consortium Network. She has presented at multiple national rehabilitation association annual conferences reporting on evidence based return to work methodologies. She currently is employed as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Workers Compensation, assisting with return to work goals for injured workers. She holds a Master of Science in Rehabilitation Counseling from Hofstra University and is a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor (CRC). In this interview, Liz discusses: how old age is being defined when referring to older workers with disabilities who are trying to obtain jobs; kinds of personal factors of a positive nature associated with enabling rehabilitation patients to be active in the workforce and any possible deterrent factors; impact of the overall state of the economy on the prospects of finding suitable jobs; barriers and facilitators viewed by potential employers that may distinguish various health conditions from one another; the role of family support; possible stigma by employers that could play a role in producing a wariness or unwillingness to hire individuals with various kinds of health problems; challenges involved in providing vocational rehabilitation services for individuals with physical or mental impairments; workplace accommodations made by employers; proportion of patients who want to return to an existing job and the proportion who may end up being employed in something different; and ways in which the field of vocational rehabilitation could benefit from additional research.