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Smithtown resident, Theresa “Terri” McLeod, has become the 2022 recipient of the Jim Newberry Award for Extraordinary Service.
This award comes from the Board of Certification/Accreditation (BOC). John Kenney, PhD, BOCO, past Newberry Award winner and former Chair of BOC’s Board of Directors, nominated McLeod. She has been volunteering at BOC for many years.
“I’ve been at BOC as an orthotic fitter and mastectomy fitter since 1985,” McLeod said. “I relocated to New York in 2001after working in the mastectomy industry both in manufacturing sales and retail and then ended up working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. I took a job there in 2001, which brought me back to Long Island.”
Beginning in 2005, McLeod served as a test development volunteer for BOC Certified Mastectomy Fitter (CMF) exams and, in 2007, she joined the Board of Directors, lending her expertise to BOC’s Board for nine years, where she served on the Finance & Investment and Audit committees.
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“So in 2005 I was asked to introduce the mastectomy exam as an item and I would help write the exams and we would meet with them four times a year and that’s what I did for them for a few years. In 2009, I joined the Board of Directors and I sat on several committees and supported the BOC and then I retired from the Board after that and of course I continued to be on the item writers committee all of those years as well.”
The Jim Newberry Award for Extraordinary Service is named in honor of longtime BOC practitioner, board member and leader James Newberry, Jr., BOCP, BOCO, BOCPD, who passed away in 2016. The award recognizes outstanding individuals who perform extraordinary service to BOC, the community of stakeholders BOC serves and those who live out the superior example modeled by Newberry during his more than four decades in the field of orthotics and prosthetics, according to the BOC website.
Trained in 1985 as a BOC CMF by Jim Newberry himself, McLeod later specialized her practice within the post-mastectomy product manufacturing field, performing more than 1,000 fittings per year. When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began requiring mastectomy fitters to obtain certification in 2009, McLeod guided others in her profession toward certification so they could continue providing patients with the fittings they needed.
“It’s like getting the Pulitzer Peace prize,” McLeod said. “It’s for those people who achieve that in their lifetime be recognized in such a manner and it’s just tremendous for little old me for a little old job that I did my whole life.”
