Week 3 - monday

A beneficial aspect to my placement at RPH - shenton park is that i have been able to work in the hydrotherapy pool with a variety of orthopaedic patients. This is excellent as it further allows me to develop my clinical reasoning skills. I have learnt that when prescribing hydro exercises you need to consider the whole picture and reason fully why a certain exercise may be slightly more beneficial than another.
The hydrotherapy pool is a particularly useful tool for patients that are NWB to encourage walking, but i noticed many patients walking incorrectly. I was confident encouraging and assisting patients walking using a correct gait technique, in particular " heel through to toe" is a great way to encourage patients to ambulate 'normally'. One thing i did not encourage was weight transference. This could have been another tool or part of the exercise i could have used to progress the gait training and would have been effective and productive.
Furthermore gait training in hydro could be progressed other ways by adding distractions and disturbances to patients balance, OR combining UL exercise or scapula setting for example to progress the therapy. I would like o incorporate these ideas and more next week at hydrotherapy.