PT Professor Mike Voight recently gave a keynote address to over 100 medical clinicians in Dublin, Ireland on the topic of Golf Fitness. Pictured with Dr. Voight are Lance Gill, Head Athletic Trainer for Titleist Golf Company, and Padraigh Harrington, three time major champion and past PGA player of the year and currently ranked in the top 10 players in the world.
Monthly Archives: February 2010
From third-year PT student Ann Howard. . . .
Hello from Jackson, Mississippi!
Wow! I cannot believe that the second of our four 8-week clinical rotations is soon coming to a close. I am definitely sad to leave Mississippi Methodist Rehabilitation Center (MMRC), but excited about the knowledge and relationships gained from an incredible clinical experience working with patients who have suffered spinal cord injuries. This rotation has truly been life-changing! Patients in rehab facilities require physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual therapy. I am so grateful that MMRC encourages this type of care. I also have enjoyed and learned from the team approach involved at MMRC including the physicians, nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, recreational therapists, speech therapists, respiratory therapists, and neuropsychologists.
At MMRC, the therapeutic recreational therapists provide many opportunities to take patients on “outings” when they are medically stable. Last week, my clinical instructor and I had joined the recreational therapist and two of our patients on a “movie theater outing”. Through this, I’ve seen how extremely important it is to provide these patients with the motivation they need to regain experience in the environment. You could see it on the patients’ faces how excited they were to be outside of the hospital and enjoying life again! What a blessing it has been to work in this field of physical therapy!
Social Work student’s internship helps lead organization to community award
Senior Belmont Social Work student, Jimmy Smith interned last fall with The Contributor, Nashville’s “street newspaper” that focuses on the issues surrounding homelessness and poverty and is sold by homeless and formerly homeless individuals on the street as an alternative to panhandling. During Jimmy’s internship, he helped nominate the organization’s volunteer Executive Director, Tasha French, for the 2009 Titans Community QB Award. French recently won the award which resulted in a $10,000 grant from Tennessee Titans owner KS “Bud” Adams Jr and the Tennessee Titans Foundation to the organization.
From third-year PT student Stacey Apple. . . . .
Greetings from Virginia Beach!
The first clinical of the third year is already half way over! I am currently working in an outpatient neurological rehabilitation center. It is completely different from any setting I have been exposed to thus far. The clinic consists mainly of patients who have had strokes; however, there are currently additional diagnoses including traumatic brain injury, amputee, and spinal cord injury. Every patient comes to “Day Rehab” for 6 hours a day for intensive therapy. Each patient must qualify for at least two out of the three disciplines offered: physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy. I have been very fortunate to gain experience working in a clinic that focuses on a team approach to therapy. A speech therapy student and I just had the opportunity to plan a Super Bowl party for the patients incorporating therapeutic activities and, of course, football. It was not all work for the patients though. The halftime show of karaoke was a huge hit!
The clinic has recently purchased a Wii system and a Wii balance board to be used during therapy. Therefore, I have logged many hours on the Wii and the WiiFit finding different ways to incorporate all three disciplines into “Wii-habilitation” and choose activities appropriate for each individual patient to present as an inservice to the clinic. Who would have ever thought that a patient with a spinal cord injury could sit on the balance board, and his weight shifting could be tracked the same way an ambulatory patient would? It has been a wonderful experience using a commercially available technology to train my patients and find new, entertaining approaches to therapy.
Tell it slant
Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
Emily Dickinson’s (1830-1886) poetry is for me a gradual dazzle. This one came to mind as I’ve taken retrospective tours of the Ugandan nursing graduate students and my experiences with philosophy and theory over four weeks in January. Do and should nursing theories give priority to a received philosophy of science or a perceived philosophy of science? Which one fits best with a Christian worldview? What exactly is a worldview and what could be especially Christian about it? What are the logical parameters of differing worldviews? Is logic a valid criterion by which we should evaluate any worldview or theory and on what grounds do we recognize the validity of logic itself?
And then they went home
Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
This past Friday night, I dreamed I was a pizza box. My consciousness resided in part of the box lid; I felt the air move as my cardboard face fell downwards. Mefloquine can do that. I had forgotten to take it in the morning and rather than skip another dose as I inadvertently had the week before, I took it just before bedtime with consequences among those the inserts predict: vividly bizarre dreams.
Many of the expatriates here take no malaria prophylaxis at all and few Ugandans do. But malaria is endemic and dangerous; I helped a wobbly student walk to the front gate, get on a boda, and on to home a few weeks ago with a 3+ malaria raging in her system. Being stricken with recurrent bouts of malaria is what all Ugandans deal with as a matter of routine. It only takes one bite from one infected mosquito. Many sleep under mosquito nets; many do not. Dad refuses his mosquito net since it hampers him getting in and out of bed. I do not fuss since a fall and a broken bone are at least as risky for him as malaria and he is taking his malaria prophylaxis weekly.
From NPR – Wanted: Men for OT Jobs
Unemployed males looking for a new career path could turn to occupational therapy. It’s one of the many health-related jobs growing during the economic down turn. It’s also a field traditionally dominated by women. Females make up 90 percent of workers and men 10 percent, and recruiting males into the field has been a challenge. Listen to this report from National Public Radio.
School of Nursing Awards Foundation Scholarships
Ten new students to Belmont’s School of Nursing this Spring semester have been selected to receive a $10,000 New Careers in Nursing scholarship, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The New Careers in Nursing is a program designed to help alleviate the nursing shortage and increase diversity within the profession’s workforce. The scholarship program is designed for college graduates with non-nursing degrees to pursue a second bachelor’s degree like the accelerated nursing program at Belmont. The $100,000 grant helped Belmont’s School of Nursing increase student enrollment with a new spring cohort while expanding program admission from fall semester only to both fall and spring semesters.
Award preference is given to students from groups underrepresented in nursing or from disadvantaged backgrounds. Of the accelerated students beginning their program of study in January 2010, 23 percent are male, and 33 percent come from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. In comparison, national nursing workforce data indicate that men comprise only 5.8 percent of the American nursing workforce and racial/ethnic minorities comprise only 10.7 percent. Grant funding will be used by schools to help leverage support for new faculty resources and provide mentoring and leadership development resources to ensure successful program completion by scholarship recipients.
First Year Pharmacy Students Receive White Coats
The Belmont University School of Pharmacy recently held their White Coat Ceremony for the Class of 2013. The 74 first year students received their white coats, the symbol of clinical service and care, as an important rite of passage from first-year pharmacy students to patient care providers. Faculty, family and friends gathered to show their support and hear an address by Dr. Jannet M. Carmichael, past president of the American Society of Health-system Pharmacists (ASHP) and Pharmacy Executive for the VA Sierra Pacific Network. The White Coat Ceremony is sponsored by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. To view more photographs of the event, click here.
Program Hudgens Helped Develop Wins Award
Dr. Julie Hudgens, assistant professor of pharmacy practice, received information that the heart failure clinic program where she played a primary development role at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Ga. received the Second Place Practice Innovation Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine recently.
Belmont Nursing Grad serves aboard the USNS Comfort in Haiti
From WEAR ABC3 in Pensacola, Florida. . . .
A second wave of sailors bound for Haiti deployed from Pensacola Naval Hospital Wednesday. The group will be providing care to quake victims on a state-of-the-art hospital ship called the U.S.N.S. Comfort. Lieutenant Junior Grade Lauren Hudson shouldn’t be on this trip. She has already deployed once this year, but for this special mission, she asked to be a part of it. Hudson is a 2007 graduate of Belmont University’s School of Nursing.
“I felt kind of an emotional connection to Haiti because I had been there before, and I really just wanted to do something to help.” In fact, a sense of purpose fills many of the 25 people loading a bus for Jacksonville. From there, they’ll meet up with 10 other Pensacola sailors on board the U.S.N.S. Comfort, a floating hospital tasked with caring for the earthquake survivors.
“It’s pretty amazing what it can do and how many people it can hold.” The 1,000-bed ship will carry more than 500 staff members, 35 of which will be from Pensacola. A team that commanders say includes many volunteers. “Our corpsmen are superior, bar-none, so we have a great team. And I look forward to the mission.” They’ll each have their own way of dealing with the devastation around them. “I don’t think you can ever be totally prepared for this. You just kind of got to stop yourself from over-thinking and stop, take a deep breath.”
The bus is loaded with 25 people heading over to Haiti, but that’s only a fourth of what’s deployed around the world from Naval Hospital Pensacola. A round of applause for the latest departing staff, and the hopes for a successful mission. The sailors were not given a definite timetable for a return home. We’re told it could take anywhere from one to six months.