With the first COVID lockdown in March 2020 we were devastated to have to close our clinic. Conscious that people wanted to stay away from GP’s and hospitals, we offered free telephone and video consultations in the early days, urging people via social media to get in touch for advice and ensure nothing serious was missed.
It was a worrying time, but when our professional bodies gave us permission to see urgent patients in July, we hit the ground running. We had used the downtime to prepare the clinic with risk assessments, new procedures and cleaning regimes, stocking up on a range of PPE and making the whole clinic as safe as possible for patients and staff, including creating an extra treatment room and upgrading handwashing facilities throughout the clinic.
As the first professional to see patients, there were times when we made urgent onward referrals. Through this lockdown we diagnosed people with stress fractures, ruptured tendons, infections, cellulitis, DVT’s, urgent back problems, to name just a few, and were able to ensure quick referral to appropriate specialists.
We continued to care for some vulnerable elderly clients in their own homes to ensure they didn’t lose their ability to keep mobile, and when surgeons resumed operating, post-operative physiotherapy was essential after knee or shoulder surgery for example.
Home working was the cause of neck, shoulder, back and nerve pain, which we were able to treat and give advice on setting up the home working area correctly.
Some of our patients attend for acupuncture whilst undergoing fertility treatment, with the timing of their treatment being governed by the fertility cycle, so it was fantastic to be able to see these patients again once the fertility clinics were given the go ahead to reopen
Patients suffering from long Covid have a huge variety of symptoms and this condition is not well understood, even by the medical profession. Physiotherapy and Acupuncture may help to get people back to the lives they used to enjoy. Pacing is essential for people with long covid and any exercises have to be prescribed very carefully.
We are used to wearing PPE now, but it does impact on communication, as we gain less information from facial expression when patients are wearing a mask. We are still asking patients to wear a mask for the brief time they are with us. For us, wearing a mask, gloves, apron and visor or goggles all day is tiring, dehydrating, and takes some getting used to but our mantra is to assume every patient or member of staff is Covid positive, and our precautions reflect that.
And what will change now that we have Omicron? Nothing will change for us at the moment unless our health and professional bodies advise us to make changes. We will continue to operate with the same enhanced precautions that we have done throughout the whole pandemic – increased screening, cleaning and use of PPE to keep us and all of our clients as safe as possible.