neuro placement

My first placement was on placement at RPH Shenton Park inpatient, ward 2. As you know about the placement, the therapists over there are only using Bobath approach. Because of that, the supervisors didn’t expect the student to treat the patients as other placement.
Basically what they want to do from a student is learning from other therapists in ward 2, practice and start to treat in 2nd week from Foot Mobs. Actually the experience about Bobath approach was really great for a student who really interested in learning new handling technique.
That’s why I thought “why Uni. is not teaching these kinds of stuffs.”I heard the reason from one of my supervisors she said it is because the uni doesn’t have enough time to teach students for all of the stuffs we need to know in real clinical situation.
Therefore, Uni only can teach students basic one and if the students want to know further probably the students need to take the course for neuro stuffs. It makes sense for me because I though we learnt a lot of stuffs at uni., especially in terms of neuro theory.
If students learn about the techniques at uni, everybody will be really stressed out in end of semester and a lot of students might be failed due to the working load, Moreover, I found that it is really hard to feel the muscle tone such as hypertonia and hypotonia. I thought it is because we practice each other. All of the students have normal muscle tone and normal pattern of movement even though they were acting as patients.

Here are some of key points that I learnt from the placement. Firstly, physio have to check whether the patient have hypertone in unaffected side, especially when the patient is trying STS such as fixed arm and elevating of unaffected shoulder. Secondly, physio needs to check the tone in neck position such as hyperextended. For the last one, usually the stroke patient use distraction and depression of unaffected shoulder during gait to compensate weak and hypotone in the affected side. There are enormous things we need to look at in terms of the movement pattern of stroke patients.
P.S If anyone learn any new technique that we didn’t learn at uni. let share in this blog~