I had an opportunity to be in a group session which involved with multidisciplinary members, such as OT, ST, and SW.
There are about six or seven patients allocated in one group and this session runs as a six week block. The aim is provide information and educate family members from professional perspectives, such as how to play and what to watch in ADLs, resource availabilities, and exchanging/sharing personal experiences. The most important thing being in this group is get to know each other via this group, so they can become supporters for other members who may have similar concerns or less experience. It is a great system I think, because they can help each other and it could be sometimes easier to discuss any issues with other group members rather than contacting medical professionals. Of course, their medical professionals are there for the medical advice, but it is always good to have friends who they can have a conversation regarding many things in general.
It was really helpful for me to open my eyes how other professionals involved in patients. We have learnt physio point of view through our course, of course, so it was great to see others’ thought and concept, and skills how to apply in play.
For instance, regarding one patient I have been assessing in hydro but never assessed on land. I wanted to see the movement, balance and equilibrium reaction with gravity and different surfaces. After collecting all the details of stable surface, I put this patient into a ball pool to see the balance and trunk stability. OT student was outside of the pool and took this patient’s hand and placed it on the balls. This patient always put hands into mouth, so the OT student wanted to check sensory/tactile information of the hand.
ST was using different tone of the voice in the conversations/singing to check in which tone the patients reacted most through the session.
There are many things we as professionals need to focus in specialized area, however I think it is very important to be aware of what other professionals do since we treat a same patient. We could easily liaise with specialized professionals and refer to them, if we pay little more special attention in others’ area.
I will definitely apply this experience to my future prac and career.
2 comments:
Agreed. It is something I have also learned from my previous placements. Like when a patient asks you about a problem of theirs that you dont really have a great knowledge of, referring them to the appropriate professional can be a god-send. It saves you from having to guess what's the best thing to do, and can often save from embarassment if you try to answer a question that isnt really in your field of expertise.
From what supervisors have told me, there are still many students and qualified physio's that dont have an idea of the other professions' areas of expertise - something we should really start to take notice of.
Same here. When I did a placement with RITH last year I was able to work with OT's, speechy's, nutritionists, social workers, you name it they had it. And it's not just knowing when to refer it's also knowing the barriers of our therapy treatments, and when it's better to leave it to the experts. i.e OT's do alot of extensive functional hand therapy with post stroke patients, which means that we probably shouldn't double up on exercises if there are other impairments to treat.
And also detecting from a safety point of view when something isn't right, probably more so with patients who have assistive devices and orthoses which aren't prescribed by physio's (i.e. pressure areas, general safety)
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