(Intro music)
- Hi, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- And I'm Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion.
- Our opinion.
Brad, hold that board up one second.
- Yep.
- I'm gonna break this board.
No, actually this is a sliding board.
- Yes. Sliding board.
And what do we slide on, Bob?
Why do we have a slide board?
- This is to help transfer,
actually, to take someone
from one surface to another surface.
Maybe from a wheelchair to a bed,
from a wheelchair to a car,
from one chair to another chair.
It's a transfer that we,
it's, can use with specific populations.
I'm always very leery of it,
because a lot of things can go wrong
with a sliding board transfer.
But for some people, it's critical to use one.
- Right.
Now, the people that are gonna use the slide board
almost always have deficits from the waist down.
Weak legs,
or they're paralyzed from the waist down.
But their legs are not functioning,
so they cannot stand
and you want to get from one point to the other.
And you need to have strong arms and strong trunk.
From here-
- Mm-hmm, exactly.
- up needs to be strong.
If you don't have that, you're not a candidate.
- Right, good judgment.
- Exactly.
- We want to just take it from probably
one of the easiest surfaces,
you know, one level surface to another level surface.
They're both-
- Exactly.
Now we don't have a good setup here.
This is a generic example, just a brief setting.
- So I probably best get outta the way.
- Yeah, you'd better.
So one of us better, right?
(Bob laughs)
So here's, I want to get from here to here.
Typically, this would be a wheelchair.
This would be a bed.
We'd need to get to bed to wheelchair.
The height ideally is the same.
And this can be done independently
when people get good at that.
As therapists, we teach people how to do this.
Slide, this is a wooden one.
They make plastic ones now.
If you look, they're tapered.
Not always, but I like the tapered ones.
And they have a smooth surface.
Okay?
The other thing you need to do is have clothing on.
- [Bob] Right.
- If you have shorts on and you have skin that's exposed,
usually your skin will stick to that.
- [Bob] Yep.
- We need to slide across.
This makes less friction, less work, much easier.
So to do this,
the person has to lean over to one side,
get that butt cheek up in the air,
and slide that under there, about halfway through.
And then we go,
and typically it's gonna stick up like that.
And that's normal.
Okay, from there all upper body,
'cause the legs aren't working.
They're weak or they're not,
they're paralyzed, not working at all.
And it's upper body strength.
And you simply slide across the board.
And it's called slide board transfer.
- Again to me, Brad, one of the worries is,
if you wanna go back there again-
- Sure.
- You know, one of the worries is that, again,
if you're up like this or a little tip of-
- I gotta, we can even make the scenario,
you get like that'll notice there-
- Yep, there you go you
- soft bed.
- Exactly. On a bed.
- And you start sliding over and watch right here.
That'll start to come forward.
And next thing you know, down you go.
- Yeah. And that can be tragic, so-
- I've had a close situation with that.
They had two people.
We got the person back up,
but it's not fun to be in that situation.
- Yep.
- So-
- Any other points you wanna make about that?
- No, I think with this,
that's the basic concept of a slide board transfer and-
- Quite often it's easier to,
well, this makes,
you know, makes sense.
Actually, it's usually easier to go
from a higher surface to a lower surface too.
- Yeah, exactly.
- So that's another point.
- If you got a bed that goes up and down.
- Yeah.
- That's a big advantage.
So you can always-
- Might be easier to go
out of a car into a chair too,
'cause usually the car is often
higher than your chair, so-
- Yeah.
These are something that you need training
from a therapist and you need practice.
- Yeah. I, you know,
I've seen people who just
get better and better at it.
And which reminds me of, you know,
as you get older and you're trying to keep healthy,
you're gonna wanna subscribe to our site.
'Cause we cover a lot of topics
for the person who's 40, and 50, and over,
and how to stay healthy.
- If you wanna stay healthy from that, you know,
I think, you know,
forties, you're starting to feel,
when you're in your fifties,
your health is, you know.
Things start going wrong and you need,
then you need to pay attention to
how am I gonna maintain myself for another 30 years?
This is a, this is the-
- Yeah, we can fix everything-
- Except-
- A broken heart.
- Yeah.