Occupational Therapy Professor Wins Prestigious Grant to Support Behavioral Health Care

Danielle Amero’s work is helping community health centers integrate occupational therapy into patient services.

Even as an occupational therapy instructor for nearly 15 years, Danielle Amero, OTD, OTR/L, CHT, knew she had to hit the books herself to achieve a new milestone in her career.

"It was a lot of work, I’m not going to lie,” Dr. Amero admitted. “But I learned a lot about being a student again and that gave me a little more empathy as a professor.”

Her hard work paid off. In addition to earning her certificate in public health from Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS) in May, she received a prestigious grant from the American Occupational Therapy Foundation to support her research integrating occupational therapy services into community health centers in New Hampshire.

“This work is important because it's getting occupational therapy back into community mental health,” Dr. Amero said. “The goal of occupational therapy is to facilitate optimal functioning within a patient’s community, within their lifestyle and their capabilities.”

In 2024, Dr. Amero worked with Network4Health, a New Hampshire behavioral health workforce development initiative, to launch a pilot study that involved hiring an occupational therapist and an occupational therapy assistant to provide services at two community behavioral health centers in New Hampshire. The pilot was so successful that after the grant period ended, one of the centers was able to hire the occupational therapy practitioners as full-time employees. The current AOTF grant-funded project will begin in July and expand occupational therapy services to a third behavioral health center in the state.

“We surveyed the staff at three points during the pilot, and they went from not being quite sure as to how an OT would fit on their team to really appreciating them,” Dr. Amero said.

Dr. Amero said occupational therapists can have an impact by helping a treatment team identify deficits that affect function, such as mental illness, and by working with a patient to build skills. For example, if a client is frequently missing appointments, the OT may work to develop solutions uniquely suited to the patient’s skills, home, resources and preferences, such as creating a large, color-coded calendar to serve as a noticeable visual cue.

“Occupational therapists look at the whole context of the patient’s environment, their skills, and the tasks they're trying to achieve. We make modifications to those things and do skills training to support success and independence,” Dr. Amero said.

Dr. Amero said her decision to earn her certificate in public health was motivated by her desire to enrich her teaching and experience and strengthen her grant application. She took classes on research methods, biostatistics, mental health, and policy. Now, with a more robust framework, she feels ready to execute sophisticated implementation strategies for her goal of increasing access to occupational therapy in the state.

“I'm hoping this work will help create a path that other states who are finding ways to get OTs into community behavioral health can emulate,” she said. “It would be great if the work that we're doing here in New Hampshire can establish strategies that people could use.”

After programming kicks off at the new site, Dr. Amero hopes to involve MCPHS students and alumni in the process. And she’s already considering ways to keep the projects going far into the future, starting with attending an advanced grant-writing workshop this summer.

“Community health centers aren’t for-profit agencies, and they don't always have resources to take on programs like this,” Dr. Amero said. “We're very fortunate to have this funding.”