A Very Busy Day

What a busy day!! Definitely the busiest we have had so far. We saw 5 clients and helped with the Peripheral Conditioning Group. There was also a fire drill – which turned out not to be a drill! We had to get everyone out of the gym (and there were quite a few people as we had the class on at the time). At first we thought it was a drill, but then we found out there really was a fire in the kiosk.

When we see clients and need to make another appointment, we generally just ask if the same time the following week is ok with them. We said this to a few today and nobody wanted an appointment next Tuesday because of the Melbourne Cup!! I don’t think we will be very busy!

We saw a client today that we have seen previously. Matt saw him by himself last time, but I read through the notes and worked out what was going on.

1. This client had fractured both his calcaneii. Today was our third session with him. His ROM was slightly better, but not much. The pain was much less (only 1/10 when doing things and no pain when he was resting). He was slightly worried about WB in case he did more damage. This feeling is understandable but WB has been cleared with his orthopaedic surgeon and would be good for healing. We gave him a new WB exercise and encourage him to put more weight through his legs as he walked with his crutches. We also did some passive physiological movements into DF. I was glad to see the improvement with this client – he lives by himself and has been getting frustrated that he cannot do everything he wants to. He wants to get back to work and I got the feeling that he is getting lonely.

2. I think we did well with this client, especially with the educational aspect. Explaining the need to WB and teaching him exercises went very well and I think we made our point. Next time we are hoping the increase his WB and progress the exercises.

3. I was pretty comfortable around this client as we have seen him before and he is very co-operative. He likes to talk and chats a fair bit during the session. It was easy to build a rapport with this client.

4. One change I would make is to do the passive physiological mobilizations before teaching him the new exercise. It just seems to make the session flow better if we finish off with the exercises.

5. Have a set structure of the session in mind and plan the order in which we will do things. Also by keeping the order as consistent as we can between clients it will be easier to remember and also makes sure we don’t forget to do anything or miss things out.

6. I’m very tired today and found it harder to concentrate. I felt today went well but definitely not one of the best days. Nothing went wrong; I’ve just had much better days in the past couple of weeks. I still felt the way in which I dealt with the clients etc went well. Being very busy was a good experience, and I much prefer it to sitting around trying to find things to do. We are starting to see more clients and our supervisor would like us to have them discharged by the time we leave. I’m not sure if this will be possible with all of them, but it’s a good aim.