Gettin' the hang of things...

 Another week down! It's been a transition to get back into out-patient after acute care. I'm not used to juggling patients, but I'm already starting to get better at handling more than one patient at a time. On Tuesday my CI left for Australia and she will be gone for almost 2 weeks! I'll be a completely different student when she gets back. In the meantime, I get to work with the owner and the other clinician, which will be nice. They both have more experience and so it has been good to get input on things. On Thursday morning the owner was filling in and I ended up seeing almost all the patients in the morning. I'm not sure if he did it on purpose to see if I could handle multi-tasking, or if it was because he isn't familiar with everyone. I think I did pretty well with trying to keep multiple people going at once. But, like I said, it's a transition from being in acute care and seeing one patient at a time. It's been a source of stress for me and I'm beginning to feel like I'm never going to get the hang of it again!

     I also got to spend some time with the respiratory therapist to see how she works her half of the pulmonary rehab. This has been really cool. I have gotten to sit in and help with two evaluations so far. It's really neat to see how they use the 6 minute walk test to determine how to start an exercise prescription for a patient. Although, they do the walk test on the treadmill, which is sort of odd. The clinic also got a new telemetry unit on Thursday afternoon and only myself and the owner were there to learn how to use it, so on Friday when the owner wasn't in the office, I got to teach the respiratory therapist how to use her new system. 

     Another neat thing that's going on while my CI is on vacation is that some professors from my school are filling in!  It was nice to see one of my professors in the clinic. He's really good with patients. I hope that when he is in on Wednesday he will get to see me work with more patients and see how much I've grown as a therapist. (I was with the respiratory therapist for most of the day on Friday, so I didn't get to work much on the "PT side" as I was helping with aerobic exercise and vitals!) And next week two other professors will be coming in as well. This is the first clinic I've been in that has had a relationship with the professors at my school and it's so nice to see my professors with their clinician hats on!

Back in the clinic! ClinEd 3 begins!

Today was my first day of my clinical experience at my new placement, which is an out patient clinic that specializes in pulmonary rehab. It was a long one (10 hours!) Big shift from doing acute back to out patient. The clinic is small, but it seems nice. My CI is young (she graduated from the same school as me 3 years ago!) and is actually a year younger than me in age. That doesn't bother me as long as I can learn from her.  The clinic serves about 50% out patient and 50% pulmonary rehab. I'm really excited about the pulmonary rehab aspect.The respiratory therapists work on aerobic conditioning (they work the patients up to 20 minutes on 3 different machines TWICE a visit [2 hours of aerobic work!!!]) then PT works on strengthening, balance and reiterating what the RT's teach (like breathing techniques, energy conservation, etc.) I had forgotten that Medicare Part B does not allow students to provide treatment to patients, so I was a little bummed because a lot of the patients today (especially the pulmonary patients) were Medicare and so I wasn't allowed to treat them. Although, it was nice because I did get to sort of observe and see how things happen. I am just hoping that there will be a good number of non-Medicare patients in the pulmonary rehab program for me to treat, since it was the reason I wanted to come to this clinic. Besides that, the day was ok. I got a little prepping on the computer documentation (which is, of course, a new program than I've dealt with previously) and some more information on billing. My CI had me write down three goals for this experience... I said that I wanted to become comfortable and competent with cardiopulmonary patients in this setting (since I am competent in the acute setting), to become independent with orthopedic patients (again), to become better at time management and multi-tasking, and to continue to excel with documentation. My CI seems very open and told me that I can ask her any questions or if I get overwhelmed or not challenged enough to let her know.  I think I am her first student, so it should be interesting for both of us as this goes.