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Recovering from Covid-19: How Emerson's Covid Recovery Program Helps People Regain their Physical and Cognitive Abilities

Physical Therapists Matt O'Connor and Kristen Wood discuss Emerson's Covid-19 Recovery Program and how it helps people regain their physical and cognitive abilities.
Recovering from Covid-19: How Emerson's Covid Recovery Program Helps People Regain their Physical and Cognitive Abilities
Featured Speaker:
Matt O'Connor, DPT, PT, ATC | Kristen Wood, PT

Matt O'Connor, DPT, PT, ATC and Kristen Wood, PT are both outpatient physical therapists at Emerson Hospital who treated patients who were admitted at Emerson Hospital with Covid-19 during the peak of the pandemic this spring. Now they have returned to the outpatient physical therapy setting where they use the knowledge they gained working with patients who were battling Covid-19 in the hospital, to help patients fully recover from Covid - physically and cognitively. 

Learn more about Matt O'Connor, DPT, PT, ATC 

Kristen Wood, PT, Staff Physical Therapist at Emerson's Clough Family Center for Rehabilitative and Sports Therapies.

Learn more about Kristen Wood, PT 




Transcription:

Bill Klaproth: (Host) Are you or do you know someone recovering from COVID-19? Let's talk about how Emerson's COVID recovery program helps people regain their physical and cognitive abilities with Matt O'Connor and Kristin Wood, both are staff physical therapists at Emerson's cloud family center for rehabilitative in sports therapies. This is Health Works Here. The podcasts from Emerson Hospital. I'm Bill Klaproth. Matt and Kristen, thank you so much for your time. So, Matt, what were you doing, working in the hospital during the surge of the pandemic? Can you share some stories about a typical 12-hour shift?

Matt O'Connor: Yeah, so we worked as patient care techs, basically the same job as a nursing assistant or a personal care assistant in the hospital, and our jobs there fell under two major categories. One was direct patient care. Every four hours, we would go into the patient's room. We would take vitals, check on patients to see if they needed anything, help patients to the bathroom if they needed it. For those patients that were at higher risk for falls, they would often be on a bed alarm. So as soon as that alarm goes off, one of us would be rushing in there fully gowned up, you know, there to help them just in case anything happened. The second big category of jobs that we had were more related to patient communication. Because of the isolation required by the COVID diagnosis, a lot of these patients couldn't really talk to their families. So we would often set up either a zoom call or a Skype call or help patients text their families or call their families to make sure that they could keep some pretty consistent updates that those people who they previously saw all the time.

Host: Wow. I'm sure you experienced and witnessed things you thought you might never see. So, Kristen can you talk about how COVID affects people, some of the primary medical conditions you saw among patients?

Kristin Wood: Yeah. So the big thing was how it affected their oxygen levels in their blood. So normally 92 to a hundred percent on the air, we breathe would be in a normal range, but a lot of times their oxygen levels would drop below 92, so they would have to have some supplemental oxygen at high levels at times. So this would create some shortness of breath, which even rolling over in bed could get the patient short of breath or sitting up on the edge of the bed they were short of breath, and even walking to the bathroom they were really having to struggle. We also saw elevated heart rates. So with minimal effort, they were just really struggling with having to breathe.

Host: And Matt, now that you're both back working as a physical therapist in an outpatient setting, how has your experience treating patients with COVID in the hospital impacted your work?

Matt O'Connor: It's definitely changed the focus or at least refocused our practice, a lot into patient education. And first and foremost, being the big three strategies that, every major health organization has endorsed namely wearing masks, washing your hands, and keeping six feet apart from everybody else. I think I probably have a conversation similar to that with every new patient I have. And, often again in subsequent follow-ups, but the biggest way it's changed my actual job day to day is, in order to reduce the frequency of exposure for a lot of these patients we've instituted a really great telehealth program to allow for people to have physical therapy, specifically in their house. So they're on a laptop with a webcam, they're on an iPhone with a camera, they're on a tablet that has a camera and we can talk through exercise with the patients, we can educate them about things they can do to mitigate some of their pain. It's been eye-opening because it's changed a lot of our jobs from quote-unquote, fixing people and, telling them what to do when they're in the clinic to now fostering a certain level of independence when they come in. So it's changed from do this, do that to, this is how you can do this better. And this is how you can manage this when you're at home. And if this comes up, this is what you should do about it. And it's actually been really great because it creates a sense of independence in the patient themselves, and it teaches them how to manage things on their own if things come up in the future.

Host: So fostering a level of independence. So Kristin is this what inspired the creation of the COVID recovery program at Emerson's rehabilitative and sports therapy center? And what are some of the goals of the program?

Kristin Wood: So we realized that working with the COVID patients in the hospital, that they were going to have a really tough time getting back to their regular activities. So we saw them at possibly their worst. And they're dealing with shortness of breath with walking 10 feet, the elevated heart rates. So once those patients are discharged home, they don't just magically get better. They're still recovering. Whether it's someone who wants to get back to helping care for their grandchildren, walking up that flight of stairs to their bedroom, getting back to being able to go to the grocery store. We can help make a program that we can monitor their vitals with. We can start with some graded exercise programs, and really the goal is to help return them to their prior level of functioning in a safe way and get them on a nice home exercise program that they can continue to increase their activity safely. And we know where they're starting from since we were there on the acute side.

Host: I'm so glad we're talking about this because we hear so much about COVID-19 patients, but not a lot about the patients that have recovered and still some of the struggles and things that they're going through. So it's great that we're talking about this and Matt, what are some of the key lessons that you've learned from your work caring for patients in the hospital and how does that inform your work as an outpatient, physical therapists?

Matt O'Connor: By far the biggest thing that we took from it was just the sense of perspective that we got. it's a scary thing to be in the middle of a pandemic and to have to isolate inside your home and for the options that you had socially and physically and mentally outside of your home have disappeared. But for those people that were unfortunate enough to get COVID-19 and be hospitalized, it's that much scarier because the symptoms that you're getting feel confusing and they feel unknown and it's so much harder to solve a problem when you can't really understand its basic components. And the one huge thing that we've taken is, seeing this big range of symptom presentations from those people who seem like when they were hospitalized, had a really severe flu to those people who like Kristen was saying, could barely roll over in bed or lifting a glass of water to their mouth was enough work that they needed to rest for a few minutes afterwards. It really adds to the sense of empathy that we have seen what it does to every person and the range of symptoms and just how badly people's lives have been affected. And it really is a huge motivating factor for patients coming into the clinic and for ourselves as well, to know where they were at their lowest point and what they need to do to get back to their highest point.

Host: This has given you both unique perspectives being there on the acute side. And now on the recovery side and Kristen, I imagine this has got to be very satisfying seeing both of those ends and now helping these people recover?

Kristin Wood: Yes, it is very satisfying. It was hard at times, but it was very rewarding.

Host: Yeah, no doubt about that. Well, Kristin and Matt, thank you so much for your time. This has really been great. Thanks again.

Matt O'Connor: Thank you very much for having us on.

Host: That's Matt O'Connor and Kristin wood. And please visit Emerson hospital.org/covidrecovery. Or call (978) 287-8200 for information on Emerson's COVID recovery program and to schedule an appointment. And thanks for listening to Emerson's Health Works Here podcast. Subscribe to this podcast at your favorite podcast source, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and be sure to check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is Health Works Here from Emerson hospital. Thanks for listening.