February 5th – 13th, 2018 and February 3th – 10th, 2019
First of all a heartfelt thanks to my friend Ivano Winterle, for having established the contact of our Association with the wonderful world of Kimbondo! And of course a warm hug to Father Hugo, who created from nothing one of the most incredible circumstances on the African continent…
There is a rehabilitation department in the pediatric ward of the hospital, where numerous children are treated daily, presenting pathologies of various kinds, including very serious cases. The are currently two therapists and they alternate daily in the treatment in the pediatric ward (in another ward they alternate in the treatment of adult outpatients). In the second mission a large room was assigned to which the department was transferred in order to provide our services easily and more efficiently. The new room has been available since April 2019.
After careful analysis, in agreement with the local managers, some priority objectives were identified for optimizing the management of the department:
- Complementing the training process for rehabilitation and rehabilitation therapists and improving the training program;
- Management and compilation of rehabilitation records: data archive of all patients, research tools for professional growth, communication tools between colleagues, verification of the results of interventions;
- Computerization and improvement of Italian-French translations of the educational material on which the training is based;
- Definition of the terms of reference of the mission of the Italian rehabilitation therapist experts in diseases of the developmental age;
- Methods of using additional subsidies for the treatment of developmental age pathologies;
- Planning of possible missions of rehabilitation therapists on a voluntary basis specialized in particular pathologies.
Training
Great relevance was put to the teamwork of the rehabilitation team, with the primary objective of stimulating the operators to be more proactive in the management of the department and the proposals for new exercises with regard to the most frequent pathologies.
The rehabilitation program is placed within the neurocognitive rehabilitation theory. The general objectives of the course are: to interpret the pathology of the patient in a cognitive sense and consequently advance hypotheses on the evolution of recovery processes.
The specifics concern the planning of the rehabilitation treatment making use of the CTA (Comparison between Actions) and performing the basic exercises. Furthermore, the physician must collaborate in the compilation of the rehabilitation report and above all identify the specification of the cognitive type of treatment in relation to other programs from the neurophysiological and neuropsychological point of view.
The therapists are available, interested and motivated to undertake a new career path.
On the part of our association, a proposal was made to allow rehabilitation therapists from other structures in the country to participate in a complete training course, considering this a great opportunity for the prestige of the hospital, for the visibility which this event would give to the structure , and above all for the possibility of having a return from the economic point of view (the external therapists would pay the course) for the sustenance of the same department.
