Welcome to 2024! Well, a little late. Hard to believe the first full month of the new year is almost over!

Did you set a New Year’s resolution?  About 34% of people set them and only 8% of those 34% of people stick to them for the entire year. So maybe that is not the best way to make some personal or professional changes. 

Let’s think outside of the box. “New Year, New You” is often a phrase that is spoken, but how did we get here? What was the journey like? Did we learn from our mistakes and failures? I want to do something different this year. So here are some suggestions to make 2024 the best one yet:

• Create a 2024 bucket list – what would I like to do this year . . . . take a vacation and put my phone and computer away, volunteer, remodel my home or maybe reconnect with an old friend.
• Write a personal mission statement – we all have them for work, but what is my personal mission in life? Can anyone else interpret it from my actions?
• Choose a word or phrase for the year – maybe a word like gratitude, wellness, authentic, adventurous, or balance; maybe a phrase like “Be Kind,” “Lighten the Burden for Others,” “Focus on What’s Important,” “Have Character,” or “Take Action.”
• Mini goals – how about a 1-week challenge or a 1-month habit change to break up the year and find greater success one small step at a time.
• Healthy pleasures – get a massage, pedicure/manicure, play golf, take a hike, walk your dog, meditate, or read a book to take a moment to care for yourself.

That all being said, if you still wonder if you are lucky to have made it to 2024, think about what was posted by the Canadian Red Cross and author Mark Batterson:

• If you can read this, you are luckier than over one billion people who cannot read at all.
• If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are luckier than the million who will not survive the week.
• If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are luckier than 500 million people in the world.
• If you can attend any meeting you want — political, religious, social — you are luckier than 3 billion people in the world.
• If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head, and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the world.
• If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace, then you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy. 

Cheers to a fabulous 2024!

April is Occupational Therapy Month! This year’s theme is “Occupational Therapy Brings Possibilities to Life.”

Occupational Therapy (OT) is an ever-evolving field. OT can be traced back to 100 BC when Greek physicians treated patients for mental or emotional disorders with massage, music, baths, and exercise. The 1800s led to patients recovering from Tuberculosis being treated while hospitalized. Later, WW1 transformed Occupational Therapy into a field of practice with the focus on soldiers resuming daily living activities after injuries. 

Occupational Therapy has continued to evolve into a field that improves the lives of people struggling with physical and/or mental impairments through holistic approaches. 

Occupational Therapy strives to improve patient engagement, leisure, and safety with daily activities through movement, adaptations, and modification of activities and environments. Occupational therapists and occupational therapist assistants provide care in a variety of locations to include adult settings like hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health or outpatient, academic, workplace, and pediatric areas of focus such as early childhood intervention, schools, outpatient facilities, and hospitals.

Did you know? Occupational Therapist ranked #10 in Best Health Care Jobs in 2021 by U.S. News and World Report!

Here is what a couple of our FP therapists have to say about Occupational Therapy:

• Why did you choose the field of Occupational Therapy?

“I believe we are called to make this world a better place every day with our actions and our attitudes. Three ways that we accomplish this is through love, empathy, and quality. Being an occupational therapist, I have the privilege of displaying all three of these traits daily. It begins with creating an atmosphere of love for every individual that I encounter and every individual that I have the privilege to lead. It continues with showing every client/patient empathy for their situations as if they were my own family. It is finalized with displaying the highest quality possible with my interventions and care. ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ I hope to embody that quote every single day.”  – Eric Walker, OTR/L, Director of Rehab, Functional Pathways

• What is the craziest treatment you have ever done with a resident to meet a goal?

“I have had some interesting treatments! I have taken people to funerals, movies, home assessments, worked on driving their car, bowling, cooking, sewing, holding their grandbaby, changing diapers, swimming, dancing, and all of it seems normal after the fact. But there is always a time when someone asks you to teach them something you have never done before. My initial response is normally a funny face with a deer in the headlights look, but then I ponder and say, ‘If you’re game to try this, I am up for the challenge.’  I am honored to be included, and patients that have faith in me to try anything. I want to learn what they love, or what they need to do, and figure out how to make it happen.”  – Courtney Ruiz, COTA, Director of Rehab, Functional Pathways

“Medicine adds days to lives, occupational therapy adds life to days.”

Patients are being discharged from facilities often at a functional level below what is necessary to be independent in their home and community, which can lead to a high risk for falls and rehospitalizations. We might want to blame the insurance companies and short length of stays or the complexities of the patient, but I want to take a moment and ask a serious question about our treatment strategies. 

Is my patient tired at the end of the therapy session? Are they reporting DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) at their follow up session? Does my plan of care align with the variety of activities the patient will need to perform and be successful in their home?

High Intensity Training is a program that combines cardiovascular, endurance, strength, core, and agility exercises. This method of training requires little or no equipment and utilizes the patient’s body weight to keep the heart rate and intensity in a therapeutic range. 

So now that we have the definition, how do we put this into therapy practice? A patient must perform at a level that EXCEEDS their “accustomed activity” or normal activity to gain muscle strength and functional performance. That means that simply putting an ankle weight on a patient and asking for 3 sets of 10 large arc quads in a seated position is not going to improve patient strength, performance, or outcomes. Each quadricep muscle group is asked to support half of the body weight during a sit to stand transfer, so let’s do 3 sets of 10 sit to stands.

From session to session, a patient must experience an increasingly challenging program to improve in strength and function, or the body will adapt to the exercise. If adaptation occurs, then there will be no improvement in strength and function.   

So, if we start out by having them work on sit to stand, we can progress to not allowing use of their hands, changing the height of the surface, vary the surface, and eventually putting a weight in their hands to mimic a functional activity like carrying the mail, groceries, or laundry. Think about the potential outcomes for our patients when we make intensity and function a priority. 

There are many more aspects of High Intensity Training that would benefit our patients like the role of vital signs, the concept of 8 increase the weight, perturbations, timing of activities, varying surfaces, head/neck movements, acceleration/deceleration, turns, obstacles, and occupational-based practice. So, look for more to come from the Functional Pathways clinical team on High Intensity Training in 2023.