HI guys hope all your pracs are going well!
I just finished a prac at Bentley Hospital in the outpt musculoskeletal dept, which I found very difficult and stressful. One of the things I recognised as largely contributing to my stress was this notion I had in my head that each time I treated a pt I had to come up with a new and fantastic treatment plan… in essence I felt I had to ‘reinvent the wheel’ so to speak with each new pt I saw, and this obviously had time consuming implications, another causative factor for good old stress! For example, if I saw two pt’s who presented similarly with recurrent patella dislocations and associated VMO and Glut Med weakness, I was very resistant to repeating the same treatment and teaching the same exercises, despite their obvious benefit to both cases. I think this is partly due to the fact that we are hounded at uni to treat all pt’s differently and avoid ‘recipe’ style treatments. As much as I agree that all pt’s should be considered on an individual case basis, I think I was particularly responsible for adding increasing pressure to my already crude time management skills! I guess in my striving to succeed I was forgetting the simple basics and complicating matters further. I just wanted to put this to all of you as a self-reflection, but also as a curious question, do you too add undue stress to an already consuming experience by trying to think outside the box a little too much??
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Great post Rach! I hadn't really thought about it like that before, I think we tend to focus on what our supervisors will think if we use the same treatment/exercises for a similar condition (well i know i do!). But i think the reality is that we're showing more clinical reasoning skills if we do apply similar treatments for similar presentations if we've seen them be successful first hand previously. I think the supervisors will be more impressed with the fact that we're adjusting the specific exercises (for the muscle we're strengthening) based on the individual. (If they were not biasing the right muscle or had difficulty with the coordination of the exercise we would choose something more basic/simple). So i think you're doing exactly the right thing! As long as we treat each pt on their individual Ax, its ok that our Rx techniques are effective with more than one pt (and thank goodness because otherwise could you imagine the range of ex's we'd need in our already exploding brains!).
Hi Rach!!
I sometimes find myself in the same situation! Especially when a supervisor is watching me. Intead of selecting the most straight forward Rx or HEP I choose the option that consists of way too many components and takes way too much time!! I start to think of what skills I can demonstrate rather than plucking the most relevant, simple technique, applying that and discarding other ideas. As a result time management flies out the window. I've now learnt to avoid this :) I pretend no-one is watching and do what I think is most clinically relevant or effective. Its hard to get out of that student mode hey! We are all so hard on ourselves and want to do the very best we can.
Post a Comment