Hello everyone how are you guys going? That is good to have a week off that gives us a fine refreshment in between the placement. After 4 weeks of cardio placement, I just want to summarise what I have learnt from this placement.
For the physio treatment techniques, it is not that many options compared with neuro or musculo. Treatment techniques that I always use are ACBT, positioning, SMI, percussion or vibration and ambulation. In addition, the selection of the treatment technique is based on the 10 cardio problems that give us a nice and clear guideline to follow. Therefore, in the purely treatment point of view, there should not be any extreme difficulties that we might encounter.
However, what challenging for me in this placement were treatment progression and discharge planning. I found it struggling to decide the discharge plan for some of the patients and it was just too many things to consider. For instance, we need to consider their home situation, whether or not patients’ physical condition will be able to cope at home. If we decide they will not be able to cope as where they were, then there are certain of pathways that patients may go like high or low care nursing home, retirement village, or just rehab in the home. In the decision process, it requires the whole allied health team involvement in order to best suit patients’ discharge planning so that our clinical judgement and experience is essentially important. Thus cardio placement is a good place to learn and understand the decision process of the discharge planning.
In addition, patient prioritisation and time management is also something worth mentioning in the cardio placement. Perhaps there is only one or two physio at the cardio ward so that it is a good practice to organise which patient you see the first and which you see the last, which depends on the patient condition. It really challenge my time allocation on each patient and meanwhile providing the effective physio treatment.
Last but not least, cardio is not just about cardio, it is more than I think it was. In particular effective communication, patient prioritisation and teamwork are needed in the placement.
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Hey simon, I had the same thing with my previous placement in orthopaedic inpatients where most of the treatment and assessment techniques are the same with every patient but the discharge planning is different with each patient and was something I also found quite difficult. Especially figuring out all the questions that needed to be asked before a patient went home to determine whether they would be able to cope. This sort of thing isn’t really covered at uni and it quite confronting to begin with as at royal perth hospital it is up to the physio’s to organise and determine whether a patient needs OT and other allied health team consults before they are discharged home. I think this is something that comes with practice and experience (as with most things).
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