By Megan Finlan ’21, co-editor in chief
With graduation just around the corner, sixth-year physical therapy students are on the home stretch of their college careers, and they aren’t letting COVID-19 stand in their way.
As part of the accelerated physical therapy program at LVC, students are required to complete 37 weeks of rigorous clinical education. This arm of the program is separated into three clinical phases with one rotation being required to be completed out of state and the last 16-week rotation occurring during a student’s final semester prior to graduation.
For many sixth-year physical therapy students like Jordan Rohrer and Kate Orlando, the emergence of COVID-19 has impacted these clinical rotations.
Jordan Rohrer was faced with overcoming obstacles created by COVID-19 when his 6-week clinical rotation at Virginia Beach was suspended last summer and pushed to winter break. While Rohrer was expecting to spend his summer completing his clinical and spending his free time enjoying the location, he was ultimately faced with experiencing COVID-19 firsthand at a skilled nursing facility in the middle of winter.
“The biggest challenge I faced during my 6-week clinical rotation was keeping patients safe,” Rohrer said. “Patients in this setting are more vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19, and unfortunately there was an outbreak causing the majority of patients and staff to test positive. As a result, there was a halt to new admissions and midway through my clinical, there were very few patients left to treat.”
While the timeline of Rohrer’s clinical placement was not ideal, his education up to that point had prepared him to adapt and excel despite the setbacks.
“Adjusting to online classes was difficult when COVID-19 started last spring,” Rohrer said. “We were just starting to learn many new manual techniques and things that needed hands-on training. I was far enough into the program at that point to feel comfortable to feel confident for upcoming clinical rotations. Luckily, we have awesome professors that did everything they could to provide us with videos and voice threads to cover all the material.”
For sixth-year physical therapy student Kate Orlando, COVID-19 sent her across the country for her final clinical rotation.
“The hospital I was supposed to be a student at was predominately seeing COVID-19 patients and they didn’t want to put me or my family at risk,” Orlando said. “This resulted in me having to find a new clinical rotation in a short amount of time which wound up being far from home.”
Orlando is currently finishing her last clinical rotation at the Neurological and Physical Abilitation Center in Los Angeles, California. The center is an outpatient pediatric facility where Orlando is able to work directly with children.
“One of my favorite experiences so far has been working with a child who was participating in an intensive,” Orlando said. “This means the child participates in therapy for three hours, five days a week for three weeks. I have seen children start the intensive unable to independently ambulate and leave the three-week intensive basically running out the door.”
Despite being thrown a curveball by COVID-19, sixth-year physical therapy students like Orlando and Rohrer are racing towards the finish line with their hooding ceremony set for May.