Maureen Gecht-Silver

Maureen Gecht-Silver brings 4+ decades of experience in healthcare and higher education.
Her longstanding passion has been to encourage clients to be active in promoting their own health and encourage health professionals to be more collaborative . She learned Motivational Interviewing to enhance her skills in promoting client-centered care and patient self-management of chronic conditions. Since 2012 she has been a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers. Excited with the positive impact of motivational interviewing,  she has created tailored teaching for medical students, occupational therapy students and practitioners, social workers, and community health workers.

Her clinical doctorate in Occupational Therapy involved the creation and evaluation of a course to promote client-centered care using motivational interviewing. Her clinical experience includes care coordination and direct occupational therapy for adults in a variety of clinical setting. She is a trainer and teacher for the Self-Management Resource Center’s evidence- based Chronic Disease Self-Management, Diabetes Self-Management, and Chronic Pain Self-Management Programs and has authored multiple chapters in the books that support these courses. She has publications and professional presentations related to multiple research and curriculum projects to promote and support self-management for people with multiple chronic health conditions, evaluate motivational interviewing training, promote dignity of people with intellectual and developmental disabilitiesand extend occupational therapy services to the primary care setting. Dr. Gecht-Silver retired as an assistant professor and the associate director of medical student education in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). She is a clinical assistant professor in the UIC Department of Occupational Therapy and provides guest lectures. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Occupational Therapy at DePaul University.

Chicago, Illinois, US. I respectfully acknowledge that the land on which I live, and work is the traditional ancestral unceded shared territory of indigenous tribes such as the Council of the Three Fires comprised of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo and Illinois Nations.