Level 2: Day 1

Well I have successfully completed day 1 of my first Level 2 :) I am at a Skilled Nursing Facility and it was so nice :) My supervisor is awesome, we just dove right in today and saw 3 patients in the time that I was there (She only worked a half day today so I came in at 1:00).

The first patient we saw was an elderly woman who lives at the facility due to alzheimers/dementia and she needed a resting hand splint because of contractures in the PIP joints of her L hand. She was so cute and her daughter was there visiting and saw my name tag and said that she went to Radford for her schooling! Then she was asking me how much longer I have left and I told her I will be there til Aug then to Newport News and she was just so excited because her family just moved to Roanoke from NN last year and they loved it there! =)

The second patient we saw was an elderly man who had a THA (hip replacement) that had gotten infected (eek!) and he only has 2 weeks left before he is d/c. He was soo cute :) He was telling me that he's been married twice, and has many grandchildren and then asked if i was married and if I wanted to be married and told me that I was a 'lovely young lady'!  We worked on transfers: supine-sit, sit-stand, w/c- arm chair. He is really good at doing a sliding board transfer to get from his bed to his wheelchair. we also worked on UB strengthening because he has gotten weak since being in the nursing home.

The last patient that we saw was an older woman who had a L CVA, pretty severe and has R side neglect- needs lots of cues in order to look to the right. She has some muscle tone returning in her R UE but for the most part the R side is a 0/5 (for manual muscle testing) which means there is no muscle contraction. She seemed like such a sweet lady, even though she was non-verbal and appears to had aphasia, her room was filled with balloons and mother's day cards/flowers. I can't wait to see her progress from now until she is d/c.

The facility is going through a medicare audit of all of their documentation right now so it was a big deal for me to learn their documentation procedures- I spent some time today going over old notes my supervisor had written w/ comments from the rehab manager just so I am familiar with the format and how they write notes there (everywhere is different!)

My assignment tomorrow is to write part of a daily note for a patient that we see. I don't think it will be too difficult.


(Please let me know if you have any questions about anything I write regarding fieldwork, diagnoses, abbreviations....or anything!_