1- FOXcast SLP: Jonross Neptune

Welcome to FOXcast SLP: a podcast for clinicians made by clinicians. It’s brought to you by FOX Rehabilitation. Find out more at foxrehab.org.

Jimmy: Welcome to FOXcast. I’m your host, physical therapist Jimmy McKay, bringing on another one of my colleagues here at FOX Rehabilitation, Jonross Neptune. Jonross, welcome to the show.

Jonross: Thank you, Jimmy. This is great. I’m really excited. So like Jimmy said I’m Jonross Neptune. I’m the director of clinical services with FOX Rehabilitation and my day to day really involves supporting the clinical staff throughout our footprint in the practice. We do orientations with new employees. We do teachings and training to the field. We do clinical content that we send out to the field, anything clinical in nature. It’s really exciting. I really enjoy what I do on a day to day basis. Just getting to support our clinical staff in the field really jazzes me up on a day to day basis.

Jimmy: I can’t believe it’s taken these many episodes on a podcast where all we do is talk to have somebody from SLP on the show.

Jonross: Yeah because that’s what we do. We communicate.

Jimmy: Today we’re getting really focus on doing something that I think I need to be better at and I think we can all improve upon which is promoting what we do and we wanted to specifically have you on the show to talk about how we promote speech-language pathology. What do you impart on your clinicians on how to do that?

Jonross: You know it really starts with when I first came into this field you know you come out of graduate school thinking you’re going to really just go out there and just knock out a park save the world do all those things and when you go and you approach your first client or your first family and they look at you and say, “My mom speaks fine.” As a speech therapist, you think,”Oh man there are so many more things that we can do from a speech standpoint. And they hear speech pathologists they immediately think speech and their mother or father communicates fine. So it started there for me with knowing that I needed to approach people in a different way and really promote what we do so the public has a better understanding as a whole, all of the great things that we can do with our clients and the population that we serve.

Jimmy: When someone says, “What is an SLP do, what is speech-language pathology?” Someone outside the field and they’re not a therapist. What’s your elevator pitch what’s your 30 second holstered answer?

Jonross: So for me dealing mainly in geriatrics throughout my career my pitch is really related more towards that aspect of things. I might say when you think of a speech-language pathologist you might think of a speech therapist working in a school with young children learning how to communicate and express themselves. What I do is similar to that. However, we work with a variety of different things in our setting we can deal with swallowing disorders and help people swallow safely. We work with cognition and with Individuals that may have memory deficits or problem-solving deficits. Safety Awareness issues. We work with them in their homes in subacute rehabs, acute care facilities. Things like that that will help them in their daily functioning. It’s more than just speaking. There are a lot of other areas that we can deal with on a day to day basis.

Jimmy: just promoting SLP outside of the profession with clients. You also likely have to do a lot of education on what SLPs are able to do with people inside the medical field.

Jonross: It is true you do promote outside of the medical field so that builds awareness there but you also have to build that awareness within. Here at Fox over this last year, we really focused heavily on interdisciplinary collaboration from an entire disciplinary education within our professional practices. And I know ASHA the PTA and the AOTA. They all are in agreement that this is the way that we should be going with our professions in the future, is in the way of interdisciplinary collaboration or interdisciplinary education. So that everybody is on board and everybody knows what’s going on. We should all be aware of what our counterparts are doing with our clients for the betterment of their outcomes. If I know an OT is working on certain thing then I can help facilitate that a little better by what I’m doing in my treatments and if they know when I’m doing it will help their treatments out. Ultimately what we hope to see is better outcomes for our clients on a whole. And that goes for communication with physicians and nurses and the certified nursing assistants within the facilities. Everybody needs to be in the know.

Jimmy: I think that phrase “lifelong learner” really also applies to things outside your scope of practice if you’re a physical or occupational therapist. Knowing what the other disciplines do and can do to help you with your clients help things go a really really long way.

Jonross: Absolutely. This week we’re working on the top articles that we have out there in our fields right now. And Dr. Deiter our director of clinical services and Jennifer Ruoff director of OT clinical services with Fox. We compiled a list of 18 to 20 articles and we’ve summarized them with takeaway points and things like that. Those are going to go out to the whole practice. So our SLPs are to get the ones that are more specific to them but they’re also going to get the PT articles and the OT articles on grip strength and staying in their homes by working on OT things like that. So everybody’s going to get everything because I find it interesting that what Will Deiter does with his clients as a PT and what Jennifer Ruoff an OT does with her clients. I know that they feel the same about speech. The clients that we’ve treated together, knowing what they do really helped me understand on a whole what this patient was dealing with and I feel like we got great outcomes because of it.

Jimmy: I love that. I love that approach which is literally the physical embodiment of interprofessional collaboration. So well done. Next topic I wanted to get into medically stable versus functionally. Well, we’ve heard this phrase before but I want to know what it means to you.

Jonross: We were just yesterday talking about this around the office and there was actually one article that Jen was referencing that mentioned that the older adults sometimes use themselves as independent or doing pretty well. But really when you get down you look they’re not. They’re not functionally well. They may be healthy they may have labs that are pretty good, things like that. But, when you look at the functionality that person has to have their food cut in really small pieces or someone comes in and has to get their clothes out for them and it takes them an hour and a half to get dressed. Those are the things that they don’t realize sometimes that can be improved. We can help you with those things we can help you tolerate your diets better we can help you organize your pills better we can help you with the organization of your finances and making it to appointments on time things like that. And those are all things that make someone more functionally well that’s what we’re in this to do. We feel like if you can improve upon some of those things your quality of life is greatly improved and it’s less taxing on the health care system in general because then people are going to age in place, they’re going to stay in their homes longer, they’re not going to need to be in senior living communities. So it all goes hand in hand.

Jimmy: We talk about being given referrals. Maybe you’re seeing people in different situations where the client comes to you. But what’s a proactive approach that we can take to let everybody know what we can do for them?

Jonross: Speaking of FOX specifically, the different approach we take is we treat you in your homes under Medicare Part B so we come to you. Especially with the older adult population. Sometimes it’s hard to get to an outpatient clinic or in a brick and mortar facility to have your rehab. So we take that approach where we come to you and it really helps facilitate some of those things that you’re doing. I would rather work on the organization in your home than organization on a worksheet in an outpatient clinic. It’s more functional. It’s doing the actual task you’d need to be doing in your own environment taking that approach. I feel like the outcomes are much better.

Jimmy: It’s more real. I mean we say the word functional but I like to break it down and say it’s more real. You know it’s not pretend instead of climbing stairs to nowhere. Let me solve a problem in the environment that I live in which is a great example. I love that. Last thing I wanted to bring up, conversation with clients and family members on the benefits of speech-language pathology services.

Jonross: It’s something that you need to do ongoing. When I was treating full time in a senior living community I really made sure to keep my communication with the clients, the family members with nursing staff just at a high level throughout the case. I wanted them to follow up on queuing strategies I wanted them to return demonstration on being able to thicken liquids or modify diets. I feel like that communication helped to have shorter plans to care for one. Because you got the person to the point where they needed to be a lot faster because you have buy-in from everyone else and also their outcomes were a little better. And it helped promote what we do by having everybody be aware of what it is you’re actually doing with their loved ones.

Jimmy: More information can never be a bad thing. So making sure everyone is constantly on the same page with what’s going on where we are and where we’d like to go and how we’re going to get there. It seems that we’ll work towards having shorter stays.

Jonross: Absolutely. And it all goes hand in hand for sure.

Jimmy: Jonross. One last question for you. Why do you still work with Fox rehab?

Jonross: I honestly won’t work. Where else. I love the autonomy. I love the patient population that we work with. I love that we have a quality assurance department with full clinical staff that supports the field. I love that ownership and management are all clinicians and you get input from clinicians. You can be certain when you’re in the field working in a new initiative comes out or new education comes out. It’s been looked at and reviewed and created by clinicians like yourself.

Jimmy: It’s a unique setup when it’s clinician owned and operated where the client and the clinician are the things that are thought of before being a business.

Jonross: Absolutely.

Jimmy: That’s a great reason to want to work anywhere. Jonross director of speech-language pathology services for FOX Rehabilitation. If you want to find out more about Fox and if you’re a fit, check out foxrehab.org.

Thanks for listening to FOXcast SLP: a clinically excellent podcast. It’s brought to you by FOX Rehabilitation. Listen to other episodes or read articles and position papers at foxrehab.org.