HayleyGarberHawkenProject2024

 Even though I was only there for a couple of weeks, I was still able to create bonds with the patients I was bonding with. Whether it was talking about tennis, college, my future plans, or their grandchildren, I enjoyed every second of it! I was also able to see the bonds that the therapists had made with their patients. They would always ask about the plans they had previously told them about the session before or about their kids or grandchildren. Having these types of connections with your patients is something I value deeply and something I hope to have with my future patients as well. Physical Therapists are such an important part of someone's recovery process, and being able to acknowledge them outside of solely their injury is very important. Also, the patients enjoy being able to talk while they are doing their exercises. This is something I have experienced in my own PT because I have grown very close with my PT. I have been working with him for over a year, and I go twic...

  I think my biggest piece of advice for any future students is to choose a project that is interesting to you. You are spending a lot of time at the same place with the same people doing the same thing, which ultimately mimics a real-life job, but being a student it is a lot of time to spend somewhere that you are not interested in. Along with that, choosing something that can potentially guide you for your future is incredibly helpful. Many high schoolers do not know what they want to pursue after college, but they also do not get the opportunity to immerse themselves in specific work fields. For me, I am very interested in pursuing Physical Therapy, and being able to immerse myself in that environment for 3 weeks was very rewarding and fun. While I’ve had exposure in the past, I was still always learning new things, and I was never bored, even though all I was doing was mainly observing. Because I chose something useful to my career path and interesting to me, I was able to make...

  One of the biggest challenges I have noticed is the notes that PT’s are required to take. For both insurance and session purposes, they are required to document every exercise that is done in the session, and the time allotted for each exercise. They also have to document the progress or regression being made, and any improvements in symptoms or moving that the patient has reported. The sessions are all 45 minutes long, but the PT’s have patients back to back with no time between patients, so if they are not able to get their notes done during the respective session, then they won’t have time to do it until after their work day is done, taking away from their personal time. For many of the PT’s I have observed so far, it is very challenging for them to do their notes during the session because not only do they want to be attentive towards their patients, but they also need to be hands-on with many of them in case they lose balance. All of them have mentioned how the notes aspect ...

I think this project has really helped me narrow down what specialization of PT I am interested in going into. I have now had experience working with pediatrics, specifically with special needs and developmental delays, the athletic side working primarily with rehabbing injuries to get athletes back into their sports, and now the geriatric side working with lots of joint replacements. All of these specialties have some overlap, but there are also lots of differences. In this field, you are working with older patients, so they are not always able to do the exercises typically associated with that specific recovery. Many of the patients cannot do quick movements, exercises on the ground, or balancing exercises, so being able to adapt the exercise quickly is super important, and something I have noticed while I have been observing there. They have adapted the exercises by either adding extra support such as a chair or a table. Along with this, some patients require lots of hands-on help w...

  I have gotten to work with a lot of different PT’s so far and I have gotten to learn a lot about their journey to getting to this point, and some of their thoughts regarding this field. For me, I am planning on majoring in Kinesiology and then pursuing PT school after that. Kinesiology is a newer and more popular field  There are lots of different routes to getting to be a PT such as pre-med, exercise science, and DPT. While knowing there are so many different paths I could take, It was assuring to know that they all lead to the same end result. Getting into PT school is very competitive, but they shared their experiences with the whole process. They all recommended getting as much exposure in the field as I can, both inpatient and outpatient, and keeping track of it because it will be something that they will ask for when I go to apply. Something I found interesting, is that most of the PTs there did not actually originally go into college with the intention or idea of bein...

This is my second time shadowing a PT facility, and this one compared to what I did in the winter has some similarities, but for the most part, they are very different. In the winter, I shadowed in a pediatric setting that specialized in kids with special needs or developmental delays. For this project, it is 95% elderly patients who have mainly just had some type of joint replacement. In this setting, the primary goal is getting the patient to a comfortable place both pain and mobility-wise. Many of them are already below baseline when it comes to mobility, so the goal is to get them back to where they were rather than what the typical baseline would be. When it comes to the exercises that are being performed during the session, it changes patient by patient depending on many things, the biggest one being balance and stability. In elderlies, losing balance is very common, but this makes it hard to do exercises that would benefit their recovery, so being able to adapt and find differen...