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We are the only program like in the country, so they get a
very complete vocational rehab experience once they get here.
So the service member or Veteran can expect to leave here either
knowing that they can go back to the military, or they can know
what school they maybe going to once they get out of the
military, or as a Veteran they may know where they are going to
go once they get back to the community in the form of a job.
As the medical director I work directly with the patient and
the team. One, it's our unique approach with our emphasis on
vocational therapy and also it's the dedication of all of our
team members that really has bought into our mission and
our treatment plan with each patient. I think one of the most
amazing things about it is how individualized each plan is. We
will do whatever we can to help the patient achieve their goals.
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This is not a "everyone is sitting at their desk; you come
in for an hour appointment." This is a very active team;
medical team that's ready to help you with your transition.
A transition to civilian employment, a return to duty,
and/or a transition to education.
Patients have returned to duty. Patients have initiated
education programs. They have obtained professional
certifications while in the program. They have obtained job
offers while in the program. There's been a lot of really
wonderful outcomes for the individuals who really took it
seriously and used this program for what it's here for.
If we come in with a vocational goal, our team is dedicated to
helping and supporting that in every therapy whether its
occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy, of
course the medical services, and we have consulting services
that are available through vision, and our assistive
technology, we all work together towards that person's transition
goals.
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Physical Therapy within the STAR Program has many different
layers. While we do traditional rehab in the clinic, gate
training, strength training, balance coordination, we also
incorporate alternative types of exercise like Yoga, pool therapy
We also try to interact with other therapies like
recreational therapy, occupational therapy and do
community re-entry. We work with a variety of injuries from
traumatic brain injury, amputees cerebral, vascular accidents,
strokes, muscular, skeletal, orthropedic injuries, just
different types of polytrauma injuries. Patients can come in
here on a wheelchair, and a lot of times over the 3 month, 4
month stay that they're in the program, they progress through
their physical therapy and get to a point where they are
independent with walking, no longer needing assistive devices
and some of them are even able to get back to some of their
extracurricular activities like running or other types of sports
activities.
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Every service member that comes through our doors is different.
I never do the same treatment session twice a day. I spend
a lot of time working with these individuals on increasing their
independence and success with daily living tasks such as
cooking, shopping, financial management, household
management. I do a lot of safe hygene education and we also
work on visual scanning and motor reaction timing to
increase their success and independence with tasks like
driving, looking for what you need in the grocery store.
I work a lot with the vocational rehab counselors and I like to
go on work site visits with them and do an activity analysis so
that I can see what sorts of tasks and demands the client has
to do when they're on the work site, and then bring that back
to the clinic and try to simulate that so they have more
practice before they need to go out there and do it in real life
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I provide psychotherapy for the patients often because the
patients are here on an average of 3 months. We do more short
term psychotherapy. A lot of what we see are comorbid, some
PTSD issues, depression, anxiety and often a lot of adjustment
issues. A patient may have just sustained an injury and now they
are trying to figure out what do they do. They have a lot of
things going on with the transition and their family as
well. So, that being said now we do an individual therapy but
we try to get the families involved to help with this
adjustment process. Just recently we started a
mindfulness group and qigong group and we really enjoy it.
We do Tuesday mornings and the patients come and I teach them
some Qigong, which really helps with mindfulness and relaxation
and then our speech therapist does some Mindfulness as well.
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I do both traditional speech therapy, which involves anything
from if you're having a hard time with swallowing, but also
working on voice, your voice may have some sort of injury after
an accident but also just being able to have good articulation
so, you might have dysarthria or something like that which can
impede your ability to return to school or work. Then we go into
a lot of the cognitive stuff and thats memory, attention, and
then executive functioning which is working on things like
your social skills, being an assertive communicator,
being able to plan things out, organize yourself, all of those
things that you need just live a productive life.
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I provide recreational therapy services to our STAR patients
here. Those services include activities that are based around
leisure participation as well as community reintegration.
Recreational therapy is very unique simply because it is
based on the person. It is based on the leisure activities.
We can get 10 patients in this building and all 10 of them will
very different leisure perspectives, leisure interests
and finding a way to make that work for every single person
is one of the good benefits about my job, its one of the
things I enjoy. Often times in the community we will
participate in activities such as therapeutic horseback riding,
service dog training. We may go out to do different art
activities with the local visual arts center. We've done a wide
array of activities with local organizations, some national
organizations and they provide great outlets for our patients.
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I feel like all of our patients are success stories. We've had
folks who've come here just itching to get back to duty and
we're able to help them meet that goal. We've had folks come
here who had no idea what they want to do or what they want to
pursue and they're feeling kind of lost, so not only are we
fixing them up from a physical standpoint, but we're helping
them figure out what their life is going to be like
educationally and vocationally once they leave here.