Good Day Guys
This is my entry for the contest hosted by @ocd highlighting the Shadow Hunters Community. If you want to know more about the details just click this Link
Rehab Department
I'm actually a Physical Therapist and I've been practicing for around 3 years already. We are under the Rehab Department who works hand in hand with Rehab Doctors and Occupational Therapists. We are only a few in our department compared to the other health care workers.
Let me share with you a typical day as a PT. Our call time in the hospital is 8:00 am. During my day I was actually late by a minute. After timing in, I have to walk all the way down to the basement to go to our department. I still find this really ironic to have the rehab department on the lowest floor because it's not easily accessible for our patients. And the worse thing that's happening right now is that the elevator is not working.
The PT's in our department are separated there are Out Patient Department(OPD) PT's and In Patient Department(OPD) PT's. I'm actually part of the IPD and we are only 2 PT's working in the IPD. As an IPD PT we are the ones handling the patients who are confined. Usually, when we receive a referral from the nurses' station through a call they say the name of the patient and the doctor to who they are referring. We then text the doctor in charge so they can do their round before we treat the patient.
During that day, we had no new referrals during the morning so we texted the doctors in charge if they have any instructions before treating the patients. The common patients that we handle are Neurological, Musculoskeletal, and Orthopedic cases in the IPD.
Treatment
Before going to our patients we always ready our equipment that we are going to bring upstairs. We also don all our PPE's such as impermeable gown, masks, Face shield, and gloves. One important item that we always bring whenever we go is the BP apparatus and stethoscope. We always check the Vital Signs of our patients if there are any abnormalities.
After getting ready we had to pass through the stairs, Most of our patients are on the fourth floor. The first patients that we treated were 2 Musculoskeletal patients so me and my colleague decided to separately treat them and meet afterward to treat the remaining patients. My patient was a senior who was having neck and upper back pains, so we use a hot compress to increase the blood flow to help with the healing of the strained muscles. After that, I did stretches and let her do some exercises.
After we finished with our patient, we went to the Medical Ward and most of our patients here are Neurological Patients. Our current patients are stroke patients. The most important thing when treating them is their Vital signs such as BP, Heart Rate. Breathes per minute and temperature. The patients who we treated were actually stable. With our 2 patients, we just had to condition them by doing some Range of Motion exercises, so it will preserve their joint integrity and motion. We also did Back rest elevation while monitoring their BP, we monitor it because sometimes they get hypertension or hypotension.
After treating our patients we went back down to our department, disinfected all our equipment, and washed our hands. We also did the charging, wrote the progress notes of each patient, and updated the doctors. It was almost lunchtime when we finished. So we were just waiting for lunch.
Luckily during that day, we received some donations. They gave us a snack which was pancit and shanghai lumpia. We then ate lunch and while we were having lunch someone's calling and it was a referral. We had to text our doctor that there's a new referral. So we had to wait for the doctor to do the rounds before treating the patient.
After lunch, the doctor came and endorsed all the things that we had to do to our patient. The exercises were easy, and one of our colleagues volunteered to do it for us while we were helping at the front desk.
If you're curious about what that thing I'm holding is, that's a theraweb and we use it to strengthen our patients hand grip.
This is how it looks like.
Ending the Day
When all our patients were done, we just usually help at the front desk and rest from time to time. On Saturdays, our department is only up to 4 pm. So before it reaches 4 pm we usually place all our linen and gowns on this wheelchair. And before leaving we checked all the rooms and made sure nothing is plugged and everything is turned off. We went to the main floor to time out.
Thanks for reading and Stay safe always!
The photos used in this post are owned by me .
