Episode 1649 - Workout ideas for the hospitalized patient

Dr. Julie Brauer // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, join Modern Management of the Older Adult lead faculty Julie Brauer discusses workout ideas for acute care patients, including those who are confined to bed, able to move at the edge-of-bed, and those who can transfer & ambulate with assistance.

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes, or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog.

If you're looking to learn more about live courses designed to better serve older adults in physical therapy or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

INTRODUCTION Hey everyone, this is Alan. Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to talk to you about VersaLifts. Today's episode is brought to you by VersaLifts. Best known for their heel lift shoe inserts, VersaLifts has been a leading innovator in bringing simple but highly effective rehab tools to the market. If you have clients with stiff ankles, Achilles tendinopathy, or basic skeletal structure limitations keeping them from squatting with proper form and good depth, a little heel lift can make a huge difference. VersaLifts heel lifts are available in three different sizes and all of them add an additional half inch of h drop to any training shoe, helping athletes squat deeper with better form. Visit www.vlifts.com/icephysio or click the link in today's show notes to get your VersaLifts today.

JULIE BRAUER Good morning crew. Welcome to the PT on ICE daily show. My name is Julie. I am a member of the older adult division. Excited to be talking to you all this morning about a few workout ideas for your hospitalized patients. All right. So what we're going to dive into this morning is first, we're going to talk about why it is so incredibly important to bring a fitness forward approach to our medically complex sick older adults in the hospital. and then we're gonna dive right into how to do it. So I am going to give you three different workouts. They're simple. They only consist of three exercises and they're going to be for three different individuals. FITNESS FORWARD ACUTE CARESo the individual who is the bed level patient, so they are not ambulating, they are not transferring. Then I'm going to give you a workout for the individual who can sit edge of bed, so who can tolerate those positional changes, but again it's not someone who is transferring or ambulating. And then lastly for the individual who is able to transfer out of bed. Okay, Let's dive in. First and foremost, team, what I think we can all agree on is that patients are being sent home sicker and sicker and sicker. Insurance is denying acute rehab left and right. And once patients do make it to acute rehab, if they're lucky enough to get there, they're only getting enough days to just barely make them functional. We have to agree that these patients need to get as strong as possible and they need to do it as quickly as possible. If we can agree on that, then we have to realize the massive opportunity we have in the acute care setting to bring a fitness-forward approach. Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking. Fitness in the hospital What the heck? No way. It doesn't belong there. I don't have the equipment. They're too sick. That's for down the road. I want you to come along with me and get a little curious. I want you to be open minded and perhaps shift that perspective. Think about it this way. You are a fitness forward clinician. You are working in the hospital setting. You have hundreds and hundreds of patients handed to you on a silver platter. All these patients are in one place, door after door after door, literally right in front of your eyes. And they are just waiting for you to walk in, inspire the hell out of them, and guide them to the land of wellness and fitness. You do not have to hope that these patients who need you walk into your clinic doors. You do not have to hope that your Facebook marketing or your Instagram post is seen by your target avatar. They're all there waiting for you. You literally have a captive audience. Literally, these patients are in their hospital rooms. They are in their hospital beds. They have alarms on. They are tied to lines and tubes, et cetera. They're all there at your disposal. Team, the patients who need you the most, the ones who are medically complex and sick, They are waiting for you. They are handed to you on a silver platter in the hospital. Do not waste this opportunity. We have to realize that ankle pumps and glute sets, walking to the door and back, doing 10,000 tenettis a day, are not going to get the job done. Those are not going to increase our patient's reserve and resiliency, so they don't end up back on your caseload in a week. Fitness forward therapy is absolutely critical for these sick folks. Okay, so we've gotten curious. We're starting to shift our perspective. The most important thing that comes next is, well, how the heck do we do it? So let's dive into three different types of workouts we could do. WORKOUTS FOR BED-LEVEL PATIENTS Workout number one, this is going to be for your bed-level patient. So this is an individual who is in the ICU, perhaps, or they are in inpatient rehab. They cannot tolerate positional changes. Maybe their vitals go totally wild when they try to sit up. The alarms are going off, the nurses are running in. Vitals go wild, you gotta lay them back down. Perhaps they're incredibly orthostatic when they do sit up. Their blood pressure absolutely tanks, and you have to lay them back down. or they may have significant fear or pain. They just refuse to get out of bed. Hell, this could be the patient who, you know, your last session should hits the fan. You went way over time and now you have barely any time with this human. You do not have the time that it's going to take to get this person up and out of bed. Okay, so think about a couple of those scenarios that you may walk in to your patient today and this perfectly fits that description. This workout is for them. Okay, so what are we going to do? This individual supine is pretty much all they got. The bed is all they got. What we're gonna do is turn that bed into a workout machine. The hospital bed turns into a home gym. What do you need? You need a Sally tube slide. So what is that? You've seen them if you've been in the hospital. They're yellow, they're plastic. Individuals and the staff will use them to transfer patients because it decreases friction. You need that and you're gonna need a wedge or a slide board. and a gait belt. So three pieces of equipment, sally tube slide, a wedge or a slide board, or and a slide board, and a gait belt. Okay, so what are the three movements that we're going to do? We are going to do a modified pull-up, we are going to do a modified leg press, and we are going to do a modified rope climb using the gatebell. Okay, so how do we set this up? You get that sally tube slide underneath them. For our modified pull-up, you're going to tilt the bed. They are going to reach to the bed rail that's above their head and they are going to pull themselves up. That sally tube slide is going to allow them to slide and we're going to add some gravity onto them so we get them to a degree of a vertical pull. For our leg press, you're going to set that on the slide board, sometimes the wedge on top of the slide board at the bottom of the bed. We're going to tilt that bed again. They are going to kick and press to do a leg press, and then they'll slide back down, and then they push again, slide back down, etc. For our rope climb, you're gonna use that gait belt. You're gonna tie it to the foot bed rail. You're gonna tie that gait belt on there, and then they are going to grab onto it. They are going to pull themselves as much as they can to get to an upright, long sitting position, and then slowly let themselves down. Okay, so that's how those three exercises with the equipment are gonna be set up. Now, how do we dose this? Remember, this is an individual who has very low tolerance. We are just trying to get that blood flowing. We are trying to do very short bouts of activity and they're going to need a lot of rest. So how I would set this up is an EMOM, maybe an EMOM for six or nine minutes. Minute one, we're going to do that pull-up. I'm going to have them work for 20 seconds, and then I'm going to give them a full 40 seconds of rest. What am I doing during that time? Taking their vitals, right? Watching to see that they are responding okay to the exercise. I'm going to want to know what their blood pressure is, their heart rate, their oxygen saturation. Minute two, they're going to do that leg press, 20 seconds, and then they get 40 seconds of rest. And then lastly, they're going to do that rope climb for 20 seconds, 40 seconds of rest. What is beautiful about a workout like this is that man