Week 1: October 17 2008

Just before I left the physio office last night my supervisor told me that I would be required to give a patient handover (for a patient I’d never met…) to my clinical tutor at the start of my session with her today. So I left for the night, pretty buggered as usual, but not too worried about my little handover that would take place the next day.

I immediately began studying the patient’s notes when I got to the hospital this morning and with some points from the 224 tutorial on patient handovers I was all set to give my handover in an hour. I started in the amputee gym where I thought the notes would be physio specific and more what I was after, the only problem was that there were 3 admissions into the notes for the patient’s 4 week stay, they weren’t great and the most recent was 2 weeks ago. I FREAKED OUT! I thought I was doomed for my handover. However, I found a nice summary of the patient’s medical history which was a good starter. Then I raced up to the ward to look at the ward notes and there was still very little for physio. PANIC! I figured I might as well read the notes that were there (mainly nurse, OT and social worker) to find out a little more about the patient. When I finished I had 5 mins to go…

I got back to the gym for the assessment and was reading what I had written down. My supervisor came by and asked if everything was ok and I explained I was having some trouble. I told her…
1. There’s hardly any physio notes for this patient
2. I don’t understand a fair portion of the notes
3. I can’t read the handwriting in the notes!
First thing she told me was ‘Relax!’ Then she said that everyone has the last 2 probs, mainly because people have different abbreviations, but also because medical talk can be tough. Then she told me why there were no physio notes. The patient had been too medically unstable to attend gym, so he had only been a few times, hence the lack of notes! We had a laugh and she explained that this would not be a handover with large physio content, simply because very little physio had been done.

Anyway, after all that, my tutor ended up just asking for a ‘brief’ handover because we were running short on time, so I got pretty worked up for no reason. I guess what I learnt and the main point of this entry is that by stressing, you don’t achieve anything and I found this out the hard way. This incident also reminded me, that as with many things, the solution to a problem is often a very simple one and often the first thing you think of, but obviously this is not always the case. (“so now he’s a philosophiser”)

Good day, good week, did many things and saw even more! I can’t believe how tired I am!