A Day in the Life of a PT Student : Geriatrics

The End of an Internship

Veronica Haywood — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:13:00 GMT

My internship has ended and it was GREAT!!! I have had the wonderful opportunity to work with many health care professionals, but most of all I had the opportunity to work with an excellent CI. She was able to help me grow so much during the course of my internship to the point where I was able to practice with my own caseload.

During this internship I have grown so close to my patients. I worked at an SNF where many of my patients were there for long-term care, so I worked with some of my patients every single day. There were good days and bad days, but all in all I will miss them all so much.

An internship is a great experience very unlike the classroom experience. You never truly put everything together until you are there one-on-one with a patient and their families. You have to make split-second decisions and explain those decisions in a way that can be communicated to the patients as well as the patient's doctors, nurses and support staff.

The patients' and families' dependency on our knowledge is so critical to their perception of the care they received, but I found that the most important thing to them was knowing that their therapist was compassionate to their situation and actually cared about them. This is so critical, especially in a setting where most of the patients feel as though they will never get better.

Something else that I also noticed is how important cultural competency is... but you'll have to wait until next week to hear about that!

Patience is a Virtue

Veronica Haywood — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:48:00 GMT

This is now week three of my internship, and I only have one more week left. I will be very sad to leave as I have thoroughly been enjoying my internship.

During this past week I have had the opportunity to work with patients alone. I did not realize just how different it would be from having someone with you all the time during treatment. The thing that I found to be most difficult was not handling the patients, but dealing with the patients' families.

I am doing my internship at a skilled nursing facility where there are a variety of levels of patients. With that, there are some families who never come around or may live in different states or countries, other families are involved, pleasant and truly appreciate us working with their loved one-and then there are those who are, to say the least, a little over involved. Some act as though they know more about what we are doing than we do, some are just genuinely worried which may come off as being impulsive, and others are just downright inappropriate and unpleasant.

This week patience has been a well-learned lesson. I realize that it is extremely important to be a patient person in this field. We come in contact with so many people in one day and no matter how rough things get you just have to take a deep breath, smile and think, "I'm changing someone's life for the better." Patience is a virtue, but something not often practiced especially in today's busy society. So we must make an even harder effort because as a health professional, it is a part of our job!