Top 4 Reasons to Partner with FOX for Student Placements

By Heather Cronin, PT, DPT, GCS

Mentor Services PT Coordinator

As a director of clinical education, you have the challenging task of matching all of your students with what you hope to be excellent clinical placements. You want each student to step into these professional teaching settings and obtain the tools to walk away as professionals themselves. Their experiences can vary depending on their instructors, their experience in being a teacher and the clinical instructors having the time allotted to teach. Ensuring the quality of clinical education can be a difficult task – we understand this and want to ease your fears.

At FOX Rehabilitation, our clinical instructors consider working with students more than just a professional responsibility – it’s a privilege: It’s an opportunity for leadership. We believe in providing our students with one-on-one, unique clinical experiences that establish a solid foundation for serving the older adult population. Evidence-based clinical reasoning and appropriate exercise prescription solidify this foundation. We are not just matching your students with “someone” who can teach, but with a professional leader who seeks out the opportunity. Your students will be learning from the best of the best.

So what makes a clinical experience at FOX different?

TOP 4 REASONS CLINICAL EXPERIENCE AT FOX IS DIFFERENT

1. PROPERLY PREPARED CLINICAL INSTRUCTORS AND FIELDWORK EDUCATORS

We train all of our clinical educators and fieldwork educators to provide an exceptional clinical education experience for students. We take pride in this.

Here’s how we train. First, our clinicians must express the interest in working with students. We then have a rigorous application process that includes not only a written application but an interview to ensure our instructors have the passion for teaching and learning. The potential candidates’ documentation scores, patient feedback, scheduling efficiencies, caseload management and timeliness with documentation are also considered before the final decision is made. This ensures that our clinical educators are strong with documentation, time management, and inter-professional collaboration. Our clinical educators work closely with our leadership team to keep up to date with the latest professional research and we periodically host clinical instructor and fieldwork educator courses for our clinicians through each professional association.

We also make sure our clinical educators embody the culture for teaching and learning. All of our clinical instructors and fieldwork educators believe in the strength of people and delivering clinically excellent care. We believe in things like team spirit, abolishing ageism, and something we like to call “exchange of abundance” or giving more than what is expected. We respect each other, our patients, and our partnerships – which include all university students that we encounter. We are here to help. And for our clinical educators that also means to teach.

2. THE GIFT OF TIME – TIME TO TEACH TOMORROW’S CLINICIANS

To demonstrate that we recognize the importance of education as a practice, we reduce our clinicians’ daily quota to get each student acclimated. This reduction helps our clinicians truly dedicate themselves to their students by learning each student’s individual needs and ensuring a proper orientation to our professional, private practice of providing Geriatric House Calls. We know that a stigma exists with newly graduated professionals treating in the home environment right out of school. Consider that many of your students may want to see this setting, and should see what it looks like to treat in this environment! Our model is unique – we bring outpatient therapy into the home. Having your students use their clinical outpatient skills creatively in a space where there is no simulation required is a gift! Your students are guaranteed to develop a meaningful experience with FOX, gaining skills and tools that they will take with them into the professional world. To further ensure the success of our future clinicians, we have an established and structured mentor program for all clinicians with under six months of clinical experience with older adults.

3. AN ENVIRONMENT OF DIVERSITY

FOX Rehabilitation provides our distinctive “outpatient on wheels” care model through Medicare Part B to older adults in 18 states. Due to the large geographical scope of our treatment regions, we are able to provide students clinical placements wherever they desire within our footprint. We can often accommodate placement requests in obscure areas and provide experiences in underserved regions.
We have a mixture of treatment settings. Beyond the home, we treat older adults wherever the need may be: senior living communities, adult day services, and more. This can help diversify the student placement options that your college or university provides.
For PT students, we currently have approximately 190 clinical instructors (CIs). OT: We currently have 175 fieldwork educators (FWEs). As we continue to grow and expand, we expect these numbers to increase as well!

4. SKILLS CLINICALLY APPLICABLE TO ALL SETTINGS

A clinical experience with FOX will provide students with diverse skills that can be translated into many other practice settings. Our patients are diverse and our unique model facilitates creative problem solving – treating in the home requires taking what is learned in the classroom to a new level! We see patients with a wide range of diagnoses, comorbidities, and functional levels. Your students will utilize knowledge from all major educational tracks: musculoskeletal, neurologic, and cardiopulmonary. They will combine knowledge from pharmacology, physiology, patient management, and nutrition to optimize the function of older adults in order to help them age in place. Your students will gain expertise in both a diverse treatment environment and patient population that will help prepare them to treat in any clinical setting.

BONUS: Under Construction for 2019

Currently FOX is developing an online educational site that will enhance the student educational experience. The site is designed to provide our students with a structured resource to optimize the learning experience provided by our clinical educators. We hope to connect our past/current/future students together for collaborative feedback and to discuss creative treatment ideas within the home setting. The site will also allow our students a platform to properly prepare for their rotation with FOX with case examples to foster clinical learning to prepare them for treatment, improve professional compliance, and provide information on professional development to include goal development, interview skills, and resume creation. We are excited about this new venue and believe that it will enhance your students’ clinical experience to optimize learning and foster an excitement for working with the older adult.