Physical therapy isn’t a one-size-fits-all profession. Just as students take different paths into different specialties, practicing clinicians can look to expand their horizons beyond traditional practice models to find new ways to offer care—or beyond clinical care into the academic arena. And if you’re lucky, you may have the opportunity to bring together your passions to help educate the next generation of PTs while also providing access to care for underserved portions of the community. 

In this episode of the Practice Experience Podcast, WebPT Content Marketing Specialist Dr. Ryan Giebel talks with Dr. Amy Yorke, Professor in the Physical Therapy Department at the University of Michigan-Flint about bridging research, education, and community care. The duo discusses Yorke’s career path before diving into:

• The Health Equity Action Research and Teaching (HEART) initiative to treat uninsured or underinsured patients;
• HEART’s role in educating students in not only clinical care but also community engagement; 
• How practices and universities can further students’ hands-on education; and
• How the profession can get better at bringing new research into practice.     

Episode Highlights

On the benefits of students serving the community

Amy: I think one of the really neat things about HEART is how it is mutually beneficial for not only our community partners that end up receiving services from the students, but also for the students themselves…When you work with a real person who has real problems and real opportunities to get better, I think it reinvigorates the why in the student of why am I doing that? I also believe it helps the students really help solidify the knowledge that they're learning in the classroom.

On raising the bar for patient care

Amy: On one hand, I'm really, really proud of the care that our students are giving because it is steeped in evidence. It recognizes what the patient's values and goals are. That's really, really important. But on the flip side, it disappoints me as a physical therapy professional to think, well, what kind of care are people getting out there? One of the things that I always hope is that we raise the expectation of what a patient should receive when they see a physical therapist.

On following your passion to find avenues for service

Amy: If you are passionate about health and maybe running, like maybe you volunteer at a race and you complete movement screens, or maybe it's with like a youth soccer club to help provide preseason assessments or even provide coaches with training exercises that have evidence kind of embedded in them to actually prevent ACL injuries in some of these athletes…My advice is really to find what you love to do already and link that to what is already in your community.

On clinical affiliations

Amy: I think one of the key benefits of taking students is that once you're done being a student, your professional growth and development really fall upon you. You have to be very intrinsically motivated to continue to do that…Taking a student sometimes allows you to wake up out of cruise control, gets you more invested and more engaged in your own professional development, and allows you to continue to grow.

Ryan: The future is bright when you work with the students. It really feels that way. Even though we talk about labor shortage and some of these generational divides, there's always a new generation. It's just a fact of life.

On bringing research into clinical care more quickly

Amy: It has been estimated to take up to 17 years for research to be implemented into clinical practice. That statistic as a clinician, as somebody who teaches, makes me very, very sad. My research line has really been focused on this idea of knowledge translation, and how we bridge that gap between when research is published, and when we get it to clinicians in order to help update their practice in order to best help patient outcomes.

We utilize a cycle called the Knowledge to Action cycle, which looks a lot like a quality improvement type of cycle. We were able to get them to standardize the outcome measures that they use with people with Parkinson's disease. It’s a pretty simple project, yet meaningful, because one of the things we were looking to do was help improve the therapist's efficiency.

On clinical practice guidelines 

Amy: I know therapists cringe at that because it's this art and science. But in all actuality, when the evidence is there that you should be doing this, then you should be doing this…I would encourage people to follow your professional associations on social media because it's a great way to kind of get a blip about, you know, how might I implement aerobic activities in my person with Parkinson's disease? Just a very quick blip to do that, because it does become extremely overwhelming.

On the changing future of PT

Amy: Healthcare is changing so rapidly. When I look at over my 30 years of practice, I can only imagine what it's gonna look like 10 years, 20, 30 years from now. In fact, I can't imagine what it looks like…Learning how to sort through information that's good information is one of the challenges that we have. I think the other big challenge that we have is continuing to ensure that while technology is growing, we still have this humanistic side of us because we are humans and humans have different values and different belief systems.

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