Hi guys, I hope all of your placements are going well so far! It’s hard to believe we’re already one week down of this second clinic.
I have to say this first week in Musculo outpatients has been a bit of a challenge for me. I have really been enjoying the work, but have found it difficult to manage my time effectively. The first couple of days were the worst, having to come home and continue to do work until very late into the night.
We have been given 1hr sessions for our follow-up treatments and 1.5hr sessions for the initial assessment and treatment. Although this sounds like a fair amount of time to get everything done, I still seem to spend about a half an hour extra with each patient. This then leaves no time to do documentation, stats, any other paper work, or review for the next patient. I have been having to work through lunch and then stay on for about 1.5-2hrs after work to get paper work done and then still have to review for the next days patients when I get home.
This may just sound like I’m complaining, but I have really been stressed out over the week and need to find better ways to manage my time. Towards the end of the week I began to do my treatment documentation (S and O) during the treatment rather than taking messy notes and re-writing later, which has seemed to help. I am searching for anymore tips from those who have done their musculo placement or from anyone that has some good ideas. I am really hoping that things will ease up a bit as I get to know my patients and get into the routine of this prac.
Can’t wait to hear any suggestions you have.
P.S. this is Leslie, I will be posting my blogs under Trudi’s name
until I am sent a new invitation.
Leslie
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4 comments:
Hello Leslie
I completely understand where you are coming from. I too felt overwhelmed with my first week on the Musculoskeletal placement. My assessments didn’t run as smoothly as they could have and never had enough time to write notes straight away. Fortunately, in our first week we had a little longer for first treatments and follow-up appointments however I still felt under the pump to get all my notes done, and yes I agree if I could spend more time on them they would be of much better quality. I am sure you are doing a great job Leslie. This is our first Musculoskeletal Outpatients exposure so everything will be a lot more time consuming. What I found very useful is making a printed Objective assessment for each part of the body that can be assessed. This means I can quickly and efficiently fill in the spaces as I go which can then be transferred to the notes very quickly. Another fantastic idea is to see if there are any handouts on how to write certain parts of the assessment in short-hand i.e. by tables or graphs as this will also help with time management. By the end of the placement I am sure we would have settled in, found our feet and progressively improved in both our time management and note taking skills. Hope this helps.
Heidi.
Hi Leslie, this sounds pretty much exactly like my first week of musculo. Writing out the subjective and objective headings in your notes worked wonders for my time management. Believe it or not from 2nd week on I was going home on time. One of my big time management problems was shortening the subjective assessment and that comes with time. Objectively it's good to have a clear progression of assessment especially initially. After a while I did grouped my assessments by positions and that made an amazing difference in the time taken. I found my obese patients and those that were elderly took a long time to transfer and therefore took more time out of my session. By reducing there number of transfers it was amazing the time difference. The placement gets so much better after the first week it all just fits into place. Good luck, I hope this helps.
Anna
Hi Les
Yeah same problem for me too. I also found that writing my S & O as I went saved me a lot of time. Another problem that I had early was during my objective assessment. I was constantly getting my pt's to go from one position to the next, then back to the original position to do something else, and I found that it was very time consuming and a 'messy' way to do it. After a few days, I really worked on doing everything I needed to do in one position before I moved onto the next. This makes things much more efficient, and the sessions run much smoother.
Not sure if you had the same problem, but that how I found I could cut time
Good luck
Steve
Hi Leslie,
I know how you feel too. One of my biggest problems was time management in Musculo. Actually Im still strugleing with it in Neoro. The things that I found helped me out the most was being organized and knowing exactly what I was going to do in each session. This may sound like its tough but as you get to know your patient it will become much easier. In the time that I spent getting ready for each patient I would write out my sesion and leave spaces to just fill in the objective findings. This made my notes a lot neater and more clear as well as saved me time. The other thing that made me more time efficient was an improvement in my clinical reasoning. Knowing why and what to chase up made me far more efficient and I wasted less time doing things that didn't need to be done. Good luck with the placement.
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