Week 1.1 Entry

The first patient of my placement presented with bilateral OA of the ankles after being referred to the Swan Districts Hospital outpatients dept by an orthopaedic surgeon. I was not very aware of the specifics of assessment and treatment of OA initially so prepared with a brief literature review prior to seeing the patient. I used too many leading questions initially as was pointed out by my supervisor so worked on adjusting my questioning so that the patient’s responses were not being influenced by my questioning technique (more open or closed questions). Reducing pain and improving/maintaining ROM were the keys points to focus on throughout the assessment and treatment. The intervention I chose produced a very positive response from the patient and his eagerness to improve his situation was a great feeling at the end of the session. I explained the situation to him and he understood what our intervention was attempting to achieve. There were a few questions that I left out that were required to clarify his social history and some of my objective measures required a bit of fine tuning.

From the start I was very comfortable with the situation (helped having such a great patient) since I had a fair idea where I was headed with the session. As mentioned next time I would not ask as many leading questions and cover all possible previous problems since some issues that affected the intervention were not mentioned initially by the patient. I would also explain a bit more clearly what his actual problem was and how it would have progressed over time. I also need to work on filling out an assessment form more effectively.
I feel that things went very well, especially for a first day but I realise I have a lot of things to look at. We were given a couple of interesting cases and a fair bit of autonomy but still with good input and monitoring from my supervisor. For every case so far I have had to look through some literature and past/current unit’s material for information and ideas (wikipedia has also served me well).