looking forward looking back

We do make a difference.

This story comes about with abit of help from my grandads god ol' friend Slim Dusty. hence the title. Recently on spinal there was an old aboriginal man who as well as his paralysis had suffered head injury due to chronic alcoholism. he was brought down to physio every day even though he didnt really want and never said anything, just sat there, did abit on the arm ergonmeter and some arm weight, just sat there with a blank look on his face. there was a particular physio ho was working with him and over the 4 weeks he was there I saw him turn into a happy little chappy who was keen to come to physio, and he even brought down his slim dusty cd's which we pt on for him and he loved. I just wtched this physio and it wasnt what she did with him it was how she was with him. In the end on our final week he got discharged. We all thought he was this shy little man but there was a whole gym full of physio's, patients and their families and he rounded everyone uo and said he wanted to say a speech. he thanked everyone for what they had done for him and said he was really happy with his physio sessions. I was in complete shock he had had the guts to say that, and by doing what he did he made our day as much as we made his.

he was the most gorgeous little man

A mothers perogative

Not sure if thats how you spell perogative, aplogies if not. recently, I had a prac on Spinal and there was an 18 yr old boy who had had a MBA resulting in a complete paralysis at the level of C5. This young chap is very positive and a great person. he also manages to cheer everyone else up on the ward when most of them have alot more function than he does. His mother is also a very lovely lady, but ofcourse wants her son to walk which really isnt possible. This lead to her being abit unrealistic about what he shouls and shouldnt be doing in physio. She made a complaint at his physio for not doing evrything they could to get the most of it which ofcourse resuling in meetings, paperwork and a somewhat hostile relationship with the physio everyday he came down for his 2 hour session. Truth is, the physio was doing as much as they could. this pt only had limited muscle activation and they were working with what they could to achieve strength. the pt has no made much gain function wise in 2-3months but this mother is determined he will wlak although been told otherwise. i learnt that soemtimes you tell mothers the truth but they dont want to hear it until they are ready. you just have to stick to you guns and be realistic.

Supervisor, paternal figure?

Some of you may find this funny, some of you may not.

I had one particular supervisor this year that I cant seem to get rid of. He is following me haha. No, i got along really well with my rural supervisor and he taught me alot, and I decided to use him as my SDP supervisor aswell. he was happy to do it but also more than happy to through abit of "constructive criticism" at me whenever he pleased. the funny thing is is that I actually learnt more about what sort of physio (and person) I want to be through his antics. He highlighted how unorganised I was, and how poor time management skills lead me to having to catch up with him to talk through my SDP while he was at a health conference in perth for just one weekend. Although I got flat out bagged alot, it didnt get me down but rather re0iterated my weaknesses. My problem is, he didnt exactly suggest any wasy to combat these weaknesses. So im left basically with a list of weaknesses and no clue how to fix them. I will just keep plugging away. The funniest bit of all is that I have been up in Darwin for a week, and on my first day here... randomly ran into him... what are the chances?

SDP troubles

I guess its abit late now but just wanted to put out there the importance of communication for SDP. i did mine in Perth buut it was a project up in Broome and dicovered abit late that what I thought I was doing and what they wanted were 2 different things. this left me carrying over with it now, as we speak, i have to tweek the project even though i am well and truly done with it. I corresponded via email mostly and sometimes had to wait a week for a reply. this made it very hard and time concuming. there were also too mmany objectives that added to the complication of it. I guess im trying to say dont bite off more than you can chew, do something small and do it well.

Sorry a bit late!

Hi guys, sorry i thought i had done all of mine, but i realised i was one short.

Importance of confidentiality in rural areas!!!

I found that the people in the rural area were very friendly and i would see a lot of my patients around the town, down at the beach, or at the shops and they were most friendly. However one day i saw a patient and i gave him a wave as is my nature and i was somewhat surprised when they ignorned me. I didn't really take offence just thought that they might not have recognised me. The next time i treated them they were very apologetic but they explained that they were with someone who didn't know about the condition and did not want to explain to them and if they had of spoken to me in the shops their friend would have questioned them so it was easier to ignore me.

It reminded me the importance of patient confidentiality and how important it is in a small town!

cheers

Supervisors

I have had a couple of incidents where patients that I have been treating daily for a couple of weeks have not liked the clinical supervisor and have expressed this dislike to me. I found this a very difficult situation to handle as I did not want to tell the supervisor but I also did not want the patient to feel uncomfortable by bringing this supervisor in to see them, especially when there had been some situations where I though the behaviour of the supervisor was not very appropriate and not in the patients best interest. I realise that patients do have to put up with some things they do not like but when they mention this to me I don’t really want to ignore the situation. I also did not feel that I was in a position to be addressing the situation with the supervisor as I didn’t want to get on their bad side. I found that I would try to avoid taking the supervisor to see these patients but sometimes proved difficult. I think these situations will be easier to handle once we are qualified.

Family Members

I have often considered family members a little bit annoying and a bit of a hindrance to a patient’s treatments. For this reason I used to feel more comfortable treating a patient when family members were not around. However, on my most recent placement in acute neurology I came to see the benefits of involving family members in a patient’s treatment and that it can actually enhance the treatment and the benefit a patient may receive from the session. For example our patient was very reluctant to turn to the left and responded a lot better to using a family member to coax her to look toward that side rather than somebody who she was unfamiliar with. The family members were also useful to prevent the patient from using her (R) UL for tasks that we wanted her to do with her left UL. As this patient often had family members around we educated them on things they can be doing to help with the patient’s recovery and to get follow-on from our treatment when we were not around. I now realise that family members can be a very useful tool for patient’s recovery if they want to be helpful and are educated on how to help out.