Is there really a 9-5 schedule in Home Health?

NPR did a Story of the Day Podcast on March 17th about Results Oriented Work Environments. I think they just described Home Health Physical Therapy in a nutshell:

The End Of 9-To-5: When Work Time Is Anytime
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124705801&sc=emaf

Home Health is about results. We are often given a soft time frame to achieve measurable and individualized goals. What is the soft time frame? The time frame is the allotted time Medicare will cover the incident in regards to the diagnosis and complexity of the case.

I just thought about this because I need to squeeze a couple of teacher conferences in today.

Privacy Practice Law

After talking with my wife and thinking about what I want to write about, she brought a very important point about what I am blogging. Do I violate the privacy practices act? And if so, I could lose my job. Oh the dilemna.

What I will not be doing - Exercises yuck!

Omg, most of the physical therapy sites out there are experts in this or that. They tell you all about the exercises to do and why they are important. And yes, they are important, but what I fail to see in many resources, is why?! As clinicians we get so caught up in the process that we rarely see what the end result or goal is. Is it really someone's goal to be able to do x number of exercises? Or is their goal more functional and their goal is to simply be able to get out of bed and go to the bathroom by themselves? Or to be able to make it to Target for that Sat sale? What I will not be doing in this blog is to tell you what exercises to do because you can get that from a ton of other places. I'm going to give you some insight from my perspective into what it is to be a home health physical therapist. Besides, 90% of the people don't do the exercises anyways.

Who am I - An Introduction of a home health physical therapist

I have been a physical therapist for over 20 years and I have worked in many settings with Physical Therapy. I started out in an acute neurological rehab facility, then I did some outpatient orthopedics, then tried my hand at Kaiser in a general inpatient medical and then orthopedic floor. I did some work at a skilled nursing facility, even tried a week at a physician owned physical therapy clinic, youch, and lastly, I've been hanging my hat in the home health arena. Am I an expert or a specialist in one particular area? Sort of, I think I'm more of a general specialist, which is sort of an oxymoron, but it really sums me up.

I work with patients who had strokes, heart attacks, pneumonia, joint replacements, general medical problems, people who lose the will to live, people with dementia, Parkinson's, ALS, you name it, I've probably worked with someone who has had it. And despite their diagnosis, I have to say that I have learned some really cool things about life and people.

Well this is my story and I hope you enjoy the little snipets that I gather as I meet people from the Medicare age group.