Week 5 Day 1

Thoughts and feelings?
Today we had to conduct some initial assessments for a new health promotion scheme at the Nickel Smelter. These assessments are general fitness, flexibility and strength screens designed to give the applicant a baseline measure on where they are at individually and what they need to improve on before their reassessment down the track. For me it was a great chance to practice my communication and clinical skills without having to clinically reason too much.

How do you think you performed?
Once I had done a couple of assessments I think I did really well. It was more or less just getting use to explaining each test and the reason behind them. I think my observation improved with each assessment as I became familiar with some common compensation strategies.

What would you change?
Make some corrections to some of the applicants postures when performing some of the tests.

Overall thoughts?
Reasonably well, just need to work on my explanations to pts and correcting their movements so the tests are more valid.

Strategies to incorporate?
Really work on my observation skills, this could be something that i focus on with my objective assessments and work on explaining to pts how to correct their faults.

I would like to ask my supervisor more about normative values for some of the tests in the assessment program.