Hi Everyone,
I’ve been involved in lots of pulmonary rehabilitation classes on my current prac and have found that the patients in the classes vary greatly in the way they participate. Some classes have patients that come in and do all of their exercises then leave as soon as they are finished. For these patients I have felt limited in what I can teach them and a bit useless since they already know how to do their program. In these classes, I have ended up just standing around supervising. Yet in other classes, the patients are always chatting to me in between their exercises and asking me questions about the exercises or their health, or whether they can fly with their oxygen cylinders, or something related to their respiratory condition. For these patients I sometimes feel that they are not getting as much exercise out of the class as they could, but I feel like I am really helping the patients to improve their quality of life. This builds great rapport with the patients and these classes are always the ones with the highest attendance. Over the weeks, I’ve realized that the education component of pulmonary rehab classes is equally as important as the exercise component. In retrospect, I realize that the patients who have not been as chatty are those who are more breathless and would probably benefit more from the education component. In the future I plan to catch these patients individually in their breaks between exercises to ask them how they are managing and to try to identify any problems I may be able to assist them with.
Mel.
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Hi Mel! I agree that often in the pulmonary rehab classes you can feel at a bit of a loose end as the participants usually know their program quite well and often just want to get on with it, and they are too breathless to talk about what they are doing whilst they are doing it. I found it hard as I wanted to look very productive and involved to the person taking the class, as you know they are giving feedback to you to your supervisor, but sometimes it feels as if there is not much to be done! But you raised a good point, perhaps the ones that are unwilling to talk due to breathlessness are often the ones that do need education from us still.
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