It was my birthday on Monday, and again my kind hearted peers wished me a wonderful day and signed a card. They're too good!
So what else happened on Monday? Well, we had two public speakers. Both of whom work at the Dunedin public hospital. The first was an anaesthetist. He described his how the anaesthetist developed from its historical roots, as well as his role at the hospital, making it clear that they do more than the stereotypical lounging around drinking coffee, listening to music, doing cross-words whilst the surgeons are at work. We got a brief insight as to the role of physiotherapy before or after surgery too. The second speaker was a sports physician who discussed conditions of the athletes heart, such as cardiomegalopathy and Spontaneous death syndrome / Sudden arrhythmic cardiac death syndrome. He also touched upon drugs in sport. Both speakers were exceptionally entertaining!
This is the week of our CVP community visits - interviewing people with chronic
conditions about empowerment & quality of life in their own home. This meant that, in groups of three or four, we were off on very short road trips (some longer than others) around Dunedin to learn about a client's life, living with a condition(s). My group had organised Tuesday afternoon to visit our client. Each person in the group had a task, whether it be the leader, driver/navigator, QoL questionnaire researcher. I was fortunate enough to be the driver and lead the interview process for an hour an a half... as this interview is a key component of our next two assignments, somebody will need to transcribe the conversation word for word!
On Tuesday evening I was asked to medic Dunedin Technical Football premier lad's game against University. Having not been their sport medic this year (three second year physio students / sport medics have been looking after them) I arrived at the changing room to an almighty cheer - they must have missed me. By the end of the match they were joking that I was their lucky charm. Dunedin Tech won 16 - nil... what a slaughtering. My understanding is that this score margin is the record for the season so far. Well done lads! Dunedin Tech are currently second on the table, behind Caversham (same as in 2014).
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| Dunedin Tech (while/maroon) vs University (yellow/blue) |
This was also the week of our clinical presentations. These presentations were about a case we were involved with or a condition/treatment/assessment procedure(s). For my presentation I attempted to emphasise the role of clinical reasoning and evidence based practice (literature, client preference, clinician expertise) by making use of a case I treated whilst on Unipol (MSK) placement. The case was a stiff neck with end of range pain (left rotation and side flexion) and I described how I went about choosing the best manual therapy technique (this happened to be Mulligan's SNAGs). Then, to finish I was going to elaborate on the technique and demonstrate it. However, following on from last weeks foolish 'no prep for the presentation' approach I rambled (probably quite poorly) through the allocated time and had to wrap up halfway through my powerpoint presentation... I didn't use any cue cards, didn't have a speech memorised, it was all purely off the cuff... not recommended. Others who had prepared well gave superb presentations!
There is a growing group of physio students who are keen to improve their photography skills, so on Wednesday night some of us made a trip to capture the night sky - I was on a mission to take a star-trail picture... here's what I came up with. The orange glow is from Dunedin city lights.
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| Papanui Inlet, looking toward Dunedin |
Thursday was fairly eventful too. Our 8am lecturer was a physician at Dunedin Hospital who was involved with emergency ischaemic heart attacks. We got the overview from the paramedic to hospital interventions and soon came to realise that living in a remote place at the time of bad weather was not advantageous to minimising heart damage (or mortality) - many hours waiting for the rescue helicopter, then a return waiting time as you're flown back to hospital.
The 8am lecture was followed by a sitting in on more PHTY355 clinical presentations. From the presentations I've had a good reminder about MSK management for sore backs, necks, shoulders... some neuro balance stuff and today I heard about the student experience on the orthopaedic ward - especially the physio role in perioperative abdominal surgery. The following lecture was on patient rights in research - this all made good sense. Finally, our Integrated Studies lab in the afternoon was an eye-opener! The theme for Integrated Studies was phantom sensations, phantom pain and amputation. We were practising our amputee stump bandaging skills on models then had the opportunity to hear from an amputee - yes that's right, another guest speaker! This person had lost their hand in a workplace accident. They brought in their prostheses which included the classic 'Hook' (think Peter Pan) and a $100,000 bionic hand... yes, we got to play with the bionic hand!!
Current assignments on the go:
- Group and individual qualitative-based assignments from the info we collected during the home visit. I'll tell you more about these next week.
... Half the semester gone!! Off on a one week (mid-semester) break next week!
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