Originally Posted by
Dr Damien
Dear Sarah kelly
Rapid Response Team is a fancy name for a group of disciplines that are stationed either in the vicinity of an acute hospital or around in the community but majorly work in the community. The role of this service primarily is to prevent hospital admission, re-intergrate patients into the community.your role would be as a community physiotherapist and yes you would need a car.
other services go under different names i.e intermediate care however they all do the same thing.
the job of the rapid response physiotherapist is to assess acute patients and assist in facilitating a discharge. so you would be taking over from the therapists in the acute and following up the patients rehab as they get reintergrated into the community. your other role would be to respond to a variety of referrals for patients who are struggling with their mobility, fallers etc who are at high risk of being admitted into the hospital. your role may extend into assessing patients in nursing homes or residential homes as well..sometimes the rapid response team might have intermediate care beds in some of these establishments as a means of stepping up or steppind down patients from and to home in other to prevent hospital admissions
depending on the structure of the team, you would work closely with the OT, Nurses, Speech and language therapists, rehab support workers/ generic support workers, care managers...your input is expected to be short and sweet, therefore the majority of the times you would be referring patients on in other to manage your caseload effeciently as a number of these patients would be complex and require a variety of services...so a good knowledge of the services available around that trust would be vital...
rapid response means your team would likely be the first to be called in case of a crisis in preventing hospital admission...rapid responses are often nurse led
being a band five physiotherapist i suspect that the hospital acute assessments would be done by a more experienced therapist i.e a band 6 or band 7
it often demands less of your core physio skills and a lot of more ofyour problem solving skills.
an example would be... mrs x has been referred to the rapid response team, she is unable to cope at home as she lives alone, she is high risk of falling because of a past hip replacement, she is currently having issues with incontinence and diarrhoea and has been sleeping on the couch because sjhe can not manage the stairs...the gp has been in and prescribed some antisickness tablets and some antibiotics...he is reluctant to send her to hospital because she is stabilizing and wants the rapid response team to assess to improve her ability to remain at home...
or mr c is to be discharged from the hospital having had a knee operation done, while he was in the hospital he progressed slowly and the therapists are worried about how he would cope at home..the hospital Ot has been out to provide him with the equipment he needs...he just needs to be able to manage the stairs at home to use his bathroom...
usually someone in your team triages these patients and sorts out the disciplines to take up these cases...howver it varies on the service set up...
the ultimate aim is to prevent hospital admission so how would you attend to these cases assuming you are the first discipline to visit?