Working PT in Long Term Acute Care

I've been working as a Physical Therapist for 11 years now on different settings and currently 4+ years on a Long Term Acute Care Facility. This setting is between Acute Care and Long term care which I feel that the latter dominates due to 95% of our patients are elderly. Work is somewhat rewarding and I've been learning a lot everyday.

The usual Nurse vs. Therapist rivalry is present and is actually somewhat extensive. The trends that I've been seeing on our facility is that young and enthusiastic nurses doesn't exist and what we ended up with Nurses' that have 20+ experience under their belt which can be handy on our setting but those 20+ years really takes toll on your "patience with patients". Attitudes flare up everyday and because we are on a setting that patients have been in the hospital for more than a week and sometimes months, patients and families already have a depressed, angry and moody attitude. These are the patients that needs more attention and care...and what do they ended up with? Call lights not answered, beds not changed, needs not met.

"Passing the Buck" is also played here frequently and sometimes it just gets absurd. Can you put back Mr. X to bed? Can you get up Mr. X, the doctor wants him up? I almost died laughing when a nurse asked me if I'm in charge of showers (meaning showering a patient). Is transferring patients not part of nursing care? This is one of my favorites, a patient came in later in the afternoon and wanted to go to the bathroom. Sorry, you cannot get out of bed until therapy evaluates you..and that will be in the morning...

Anyways, this is just the tip of the iceberg and there will be more to come in upcoming updates.

;)

Therapy jobs on the rise....

As of May 31st., The rehabtime.com database showed 18,831 available jobs for physical therapists, 10, 495 for occupational therapists and 5,943 for Speech Therapy. Physical Therapy jobs are still the one leading and the demand is increasing every year. This trend is brought about by a lot of "baby boomers" are already on their 60's and this will just tend to spike up in the next few years. So, if this is the perfect time to go and join the healthcare profession...

Rehabtime.com reborn

Rehabtime.com has been reborn. This website started in the year 2000 and had many followers but other priorities prevented the website to reach its potential. The main goal of the author at that time is for the website to be the outpost for therapists (physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and the rehab team). From job searching to buying books, forums, continuing education search etc.
Year 2008 and the author partnered with Indeed.com - a leading search engine focused on jobs search. Their software browses the web for jobs getting and saving information from major job sites like Monster, Hot Jobs, Career Builder, etc. It also retrieves information from niche websites like therapyjobs.com and even gets jobs from newspaper, magazines and classifieds. This technology will change job search making rehabtime.com the largest source of therapy jobs. Try it out and visit the site.

http://www.rehabtime.com/