Heidi Engel, PT, DPT: Family Engagement in the Intensive Care Unit

Welcome to the mobility minute podcast. This is our first episode of season 2 and we are super excited to kick off a new season with even more content on hospital patient mobility. We have an awesome lineup of clinicians, academics, and other key stakeholders dedicated to patient outcomes.

I am your host Drew Martin – but our focus today is on critical care physical therapy. Our guest Heidi Engel, PT, DPT has spent over 34 years in healthcare and has focused the last 11 years on ICU mobility. She leads physical therapy for a large academic healthcare center in San Francisco where she has been instrumental in establishing mobility initiatives. Heidi has published work regarding the ICU liberation campaign and A to F bundle. As you hear in the upcoming session, she is very keen on the physiological impacts of walking and shares her perspectives on humanizing a critically ill patient. Family engagement is extremely important to Heidi’s ICU, and she believes patient and family buy-in is essential to the execution of critical care mobility.

We get into all these topics and more during our conversation so let’s get right into it…