In the rehabilitation setting, patients tend to be in hospital for an extended period of time, some even up to 9 months. Consequently over that time, many students come and go. When dealing will ABI patients, there is always a probability of behavioural issues, therefore to get the most out of our neurology experience the supervisors will tend to allocate patients with little behavioural problems and always a good hemi. Unfortunately with low turn over of patients and such a specified patient presentation, it can be the same patients that get allocated students. This means a slow thorough ax and analysis before treatment. By the third student, the patient begins to know more about his presentation than us in addition becoming frustrated and unmotivated.
So being the 6th round of students for this particular patient, it was fairly obvious that he has preconceptions about physio students. I could completely empathise with this patient. For both of us students there, we both felt very unworthy of assessing and treating this patient. The supervisors were already aware of this patients feelings and his motivation to just continue with his usual physio sessions. We were not allocated this patient for our daily sessions.
Over the weeks spent on this placement, gradual rapport was built with this patient and made me realise that even though we are here to learn from the patients, the patients expect the therapist to use their time efficiently and see results. I will now always endevour to prepare for patient sessions and make sure ax, analysis and treatments are explained and related to the patient for a combined goal vision.
1 comment:
Its good you've identified this Em. This is a problem i have had concerns with in various placements. This is something that the facility should consider when continually giving the patient various students every 4 weeks. Unfortunately for patients who require prolonged treatment, the turnover of students disrupts the continuity of their treatment. In an ideal world, all patients would arrive and leave in the same time frame as the students, but this is obviously impossible. Maybe when we are in the workplace, and confronted with a similar problem, we will be able to sort out a procedure to combat this.
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