Becoming resilient

Rehabilitation professions are about helping people recover from illness to return to what matters in life. Sometimes as I read the myriad social media posts on ways to help people with pain, I wonder what kind of life rehabilitation professionals live themselves. Does our focus on what’s done during rehabilitation represent the way people live in everyday life? I suspect that because rehabilitation has emerged from a medical model, much of our expectations and the framework for our work has remained in a “fix-it” or “there you go, good as new” mindset. A kind of short-term, out the door and back home lens, exacerbated by hospital adminstrators and policy developers needs to get people to leave hospital so as not to clog the beds. Rehabilitation is often provided for people recovering from accidental injury, at least in NZ. These services consist of lots of physiotherapy – mainly exercise prescription; vocational rehabilitation – mainly time-frame expectations for the number of hours a person should be working, with adjustments made to tasks and some equipment; psychology – possibly cognitive behavioural approaches, but no specialist rehabilitation psychology yet in NZ. The main problems with rehabilitation for persistent pain is that while provision for people receiving compensation is available (very little for those not receiving ACC), it’s often located away from where people live their lives. Even in the work...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Coping Skills Coping strategies Pain conditions Professional topics Resilience/Health Science in practice adaptability evolution flexibility pain rehabilitation rehabilitation theory Source Type: blogs