I recently finished by third placement as part of the acute stroke team at the Halifax Infirmary. The stroke team I worked with certainly deserves to be called a TEAM. Everyone worked really well together to share treatment times, collaborate on ideas, and ask questions to one another about how a particular patient was doing in different aspects of therapy.

The lessons I learned is that my role as a physiotherapy student and physiotherapist is bigger than just focusing on balance and mobility. My role is to look at the patient through a holistic view, taking into consideration their home environment, their goals, and their function in other aspects of their lives. I also learned a lot more about the roles of other health professionals, especially recreational therapists and speech language pathologists, which I didn’t know much about before this placement. This also helped me to know who to talk to if I had a question about a particular patient. Attending weekly discharge planning meetings also helped me with goal setting with my patients, as I was better able to determine a prognosis and understand where a patient was likely to go after they got out of the hospital.

My role as a student changed a lot over the course of this placement. I started out as the student in the back corner who just sat in on discharge planning meetings, but by my third week I was the one sitting at the table discussing patients, while my CI sat in the background. After hearing me speak up at rounds about how a patient was doing from a PT point of view and asking questions of other health professionals, the rest of the team started to respect me more. They started coming to me throughout the week with questions about patients and often asked me for help when transferring a patient.

As a future clinician, I will take forward a lot of the knowledge I learned from my experience in weekly discharge planning at the HI and from my placement as a whole! The acute stroke team served as a great model of how closely a health care team should work together and I hope I will find myself in a future job that has such a great team. I will carry forward with me a much greater knowledge of the roles of different health professionals and of how I fit into that mix. I will also carry forward into my future work the knowledge I now have of the importance of looking at the entire patient, instead of just focusing on the physiotherapy concerns that I might have.

By: Kayla MacRae (Class of 2014)