Clinic Day 3

With a little sleep aid I finally got a full nights rest. Waking up refreshed make the day so much better. After another huge breakfast we all headed to the clinic.

The students jumped right in and had a busy day treating alongside the Kenyan therapists getting great experiences.  The students got to experience how patients expose skin for treatments, the flow of patient treatment, and the different levels of clinical skill based on education.

They also had a very interesting case where the MD and physio believed it was an upper motor lesion but the clinical objective measurements were lower motor.  We had a great discussion of how our examination should drive treatment and we should not be afraid here or at home to present our findings to other professionals. We owe it to our patients to treat in a team approach and to value the findings of each profession to help give the best outcome for each case.

The first mentoring session of the day was the strongest of the week.  Lydia has been practicing for a few years and was coming back for residency training.  Before our patient arrived we worked on cervical techniques as she felt very uncomfortable with this area of the body.  It was very refreshing to have someone asking to learn and desiring knowledge.

She was treating a patient who was been in PT for 1.5 years for a disc pathology. His beliefs and understanding of his rehabilitation has caused him to become fear avoidant and limited. Lydia caught on to this with some guidance and did very insightful and patient centered education.  Providing this in combination with motor control training completely changed the patients affect,  movement, and hope for recovery.   I was so proud of her ability to think this way with patients as I had not seen it since being here in Kenya.

 

The second mentoring session was with Raphael. He had also been practicing for a few years but needed more cues for completing a through evaluation and assessment. The patient also had low back pain but needed less education as she was a nurse and was much more understanding of the science behind her symptoms. He did learn new strategies for exercise prescription and motor control training. It is so interesting to see how varying the understanding of exercises and movement between therapists. Raphael really enjoyed learning how to think and we spent almost an hour going over thinking about patients after this mentoring session.

We were so busy we ended up missing lunch. The SU students presented a fantastic inservice in the afternoon. They noticed a lack of functional exercises being prescribed in the clinic and wanted to focus on how this thinking could be applied to various patient examples.  They did a lot of group thinking and examples which really got the Kenyan therapists thinking. Afterword the talk the therapists had great questions and the students left them with some great take home points

We returned home and I was able to get a P90 yoga session in between tea and dinner. We had a great traditional goat meal with our group and six of the staff from the hospital.  We had great conversation, cross cultural bonding, and a traditional eating experience. Best night of the trip so far!