FINAL ENTRY: 3rd year placement

They were not joking when they said i would see a lot of torticollis! Around 90% of the patients we saw were referred for treatment of toricollis and plagiocephaly. The other 10% were for developmental delay or DCD.
It was tough at the start of this placement because the centre were changing to an electronic database so the first 2 weeks I was there, the Physio department had dedicated it to getting logged on, learning and getting their patients onto the database. So I only got to see around 3 patients a day if i was lucky, which was a bit dissapointing. Then they didnt end up getting onto the database till the 3rd week i was there so even that was slow with minimal patients. This took up a loy of my supervisors time so i spent the majority of the time with the pther physios who were in the middle of not having their contracts renewed so they weren't taking on new patients. So unfortunatley i didn't get much of an opportunity to begin to handle the patients until the end of the 3rd week.
Though I think now I could safely say I feel confident in prescribing exercises for treating torticollis!! But what this placement did show me was how important teamwork is and how important it is to keep up communication between the diciplines on multi-disciplinary patients. The importance of getting the family involved and on-board with treatments was also showed espcecially with the patients with torticollis as it is the parents who will be doing the treatments in their daily lives.
I think it was unfortunate that I was at this placement when I was because of all the changes that were happening at the centre and in the physio department and would have been a good placement had I been there at a different point.